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Category: Site Related

May 16 Website Updates

Good morning,

It’s been over a month now since I’ve filmed any tornadoes. There have been chases, there have been cool photography, but no major tornado events since April 14. There are indications that severe weather may return to portions of the Plains by the weekend and next week, but that’s just speculation at this point. I’ve been using this downtime to catch up on some other hobbies and finally have time to add several items to the Texas Storm Chasers website. I’ll go ahead and put them in bullet style.

* May 6 and May 11 photography posts added to the “Latest Chases” box on the homepage.

* Chase logs for February 28, March 18, and March 21 have been added and are available by accessing the Storm Chase Logs tab in the linkbar.

My next goal is to add my chase log for April 3. That may sound simple enough, but I’m going to spend extra time writing out every single detail of that chase. I’m going to try and do that today and I have no doubt it’s going to end up being a short novel. There are a few items I’m going to address in that (driving on highway shoulders in grid-locked traffic, the overall mindset of the day once it became apparent that was happening, and a secret I haven’t revealed about April 3.) The 28 second video we uploaded to our YouTube channel was from my new camera. What folks don’t know is that I had a HD camcorder running on the dash. I’ll reveal some of that video in the April 3 chase log as well. I’ve chased many setups over the years and up until April 3, the scariest day for me was my near death experience on April 24, 2010 out in Mississippi. That changed on April 3, not because of danger to my personal self, but the overall situation.

I’ll detail all of that in my April 3rd log.

~ David

Website Updates

Good morning,

We’ve made several changes to the website overnight, nothing drastic, but they will hopefully prove to improve the user experience. The first change as to add OpenID compatibility to the website. If you have an OpenID, you can now log in to the website without having to make a separate account. Before we began paying for spam protection, we dealt with a lot of bots registering accounts with the website, thus we’ll be going through the account list today deleting accounts that look to be fake and/or have made no posts. Should that include your account, simply re-register with the website. That takes only a few seconds. The second major change was to re-arrange the sidebars a bit and added a ‘top commentators’ box. The third change was to remove the sidebar social media buttons. After doing some investigating, I found the sidebar buttons to be to intrusive, even with a restriction that the screen size must be at least 1300 pixels wide, thus I removed that specific plugin and added a different one that will now display below our logo. Since this is a horizontal design, it should have no affect on the width of the screen.

Besides those items and a few other minor changes, I’m going to continue to work on improving the experience for yall. I’ve got the website where I want it in terms of the function-ability on my end (We were on a basic frontpage website just last year around this time.) Now its time to build in a dynamic user experience so yall can enjoy the website as well. It appears the tropics may be heating up by late this weekend, but more about that later today. Have a good Thursday!

A few website updates…

Good afternoon,

I’ve just spent several hours working on the website. As regulars may already have realized, I did change the layout of the website slightly. Instead of going into a long paragraph describing each change I did, I’ll just list them in number format below.

1. Moved photogallery link and ENG video link from ‘past chases’ to main linkbar.
2. Renamed ENG video to Breaking News Video
3. Renamed Past Chases to Past Chase Video.
4. Added a piece of code to the ‘share buttons’ on the right side of the page not to display if the page width is lower then 1300 px.
5. Added a new program to shed some of the webload off the database, thus providing a slightly faster response time.
6. Moved the header ad from below the header to above the header. This move has allowed for a reduction in space from the header graphic to the main content of the page.
7. Uploaded a new header image that is slightly smaller.
8. Fixed transparency issue with left sidebar.

I’ll add any additional changes to the list as the day continues. I’ll have a new discussion regarding next week’s active pattern by this evening.
- David

Site layout changes!

We’ve made a few minor rearrangements to the look of the home page here. What do you think? Nothing is set in stone, so if you have a suggestion let us know in the comments! We want your input anytime you have a recommendation!

February 27, 2011 Chase Log Online!

Good Evening,

I just finished up writing the chase log for our February 27th chase out in Northern Oklahoma/Extreme S. Kansas. This is the first time, besides Yazoo City, where we’ve written out a complete chase log with embedded information such as radar images and video grabs. A lot of other chasers do write chase logs for all their chases and one of my 2011 goals is to get a log produced for each chase. I invite you to take a few minutes to check out the log for February 27 and provide feedback, and if you like it, share it with your friends!

You can access our chase page (with the log and video grabs, plus the video) here.

Chase Status

This shows the probability of a storm chase within the next 5 days.

Click here for more information

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Weather Conditions

86°
30°
°F | °C
Clear
Humidity: 33%
Wind: S at 21 mph
Fri
Clear
66 | 90
18 | 32
Sat
Clear
66 | 91
18 | 32
Sun
Mostly Sunny
68 | 91
20 | 32
Mon
Mostly Sunny
68 | 90
20 | 32

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