Excited to upload my first behind-the-scenes video tomorrow, it’s the story of why I wore Art Monk’s number for so many years. I have been sitting on this video for a while as it was suppose to go up at the start of football season, but I missed that week due to being out in the field, and given the downtime I have had this last week, it was an easy slide-in as I just didn’t have the brain capacity to edit a full video. Yes, it’s the lazy approach, but past Tony did well at editing a few videos to have in the can for weeks just like this, and given some content space being created on my site lately, this felt like the right time to do it. It goes live tomorrow, and you can go read all about it in the page dedicated to the story, and the video will go live there as well tomorrow.
Speaking of fun pages, one has gone live that I am extremely excited about. When I got my traction designing this new site, one of the ideas I have carried around with me was the vehicle page, which was always a staple of previous sites. I wanted a specific look/feature where all the vehicles were listed and when once was activated, it would display the stats on that particular vehicle on the same page. For most of my earlier sites, I would create a main vehicle landing page, and each vehicle would have its own page. But I wanted to wrangle all that onto once section and make it very interactable allowing a visitor to look at all the vehicles on one loaded page. Well, I finally made that a reality, and honestly it’s one of my favorite pages on the site. You can check out my vehicle page here. This was meant to be a throw-away page, but I liked the result so much that I actually added a direct link to the main menu under my storm chasing, so go check it out!
There are a ton of behind-the-scenes, backend stuff, I have ongoing. Its been a slow burn for me as I am coming off a crazy bit of travel over the last couple months, I’ve had a head cold that feels like Covid, particularly the brainfog, which just knocks me out. It’s been a grind since getting home last week as my previous trip I was not near 100% by any stretch, and honestly haven’t been for a couple weeks. Add to that a long-last flare and my body has definitely had its days of struggle here lately. The down time has been nice if for anything just to not feel stress and pressure to have to do anything. The random bursts of energy have given me some activity, but otherwise it’s been a slog this last week here at home. But that’s the big key, here at home… I wish I could say it’s been better, but it hasn’t been worse, so I guess that on its own is an improvement, so with a few more days into the weekend to relax, I am hoping to get out of the brainfog at least, which has been the most limiting issue for me.
As for the backend work, this new resurgence in WordPress and coding has been so much fun, and it’s amazing how much more you can do now than I could back in the day. I’ve had a lot of fun working on some stuff that most of you won’t ever really see, but it’s always been a huge part of the web design process for me. Because my page deals with so many stats and logs, it’s been fun to create ways to ease that workflow. One of those long-time projects finally was finished earlier this week where I designed a program that imported all 1,000+ chase logs since 2002, imported all the stats, and a sub-program in there actually went out and downloaded ALL the SPC archive graphics, which I have had to do manually every time I created a new log. Now all that already exists in the log, and every since chase log I have ever had now awaits its turn to go live. This program probably saved me MONTHS of tedious work as basically all that is left to do now is populate the logs with the text and images. That process on its own will be a HUGE undertaking, but I have managed to get everything set up, which means that is literally all that is left. I also organized this in a way so that all these imports were separate from the usual list of WordPress posts, which means they’re all in one place and jumbled together with the hundreds of drafts and published logs I already have on the site, which just makes the process so much easier. Seriously, I cannot overstate how much time this saves me and how much easier this will make getting old logs online. The process to fill in all the specific fields and manually go get archive graphics took ten minutes per log, multiple that over hundreds of logs and you’re talking hours, if not days worth of work. Not to mention I extended this to creating NEW logs, meaning anything I add to it moving forward will automate a lot of this work, including fetching the archive graphics, so just a great add-on all around.
All this has been weeks, if not months in the making, so I am super excited to see so much of this effort finally coming to fruition. It has been a grind to get the site to a point where it was ready to take in all the content that’s been sitting and waiting. And for the chase logs, this will be a long process, and I am still deciding how to tackle the work. I added into my importer to mark tornado chases and busts, because those will be the first tackles. Tornado logs, obviously hold the most importance for me, and while a lot of them are up and fully completed, there are a large handful still needing published. Busts are easy, since most of those do not require a write-up, just a excerpt and an image, I marked those cause I can knock out several of them at a time and probably knock out that list of 130+ in a couple short sessions. A lot of the unpublished logs exist digitally in some capacity, including write-ups, from former versions of my sites, so all that’s required there is updating pictures, which I am also working on behind the scenes to help quicken that process.
This will be my passion project during the winter between whatever temper tantrums Ma-Nature opts to throw, and given I have finally turned the corner in terms of getting most of the programing, visual coding, and setup done to the point where it is now all about content generation, I am super excited to finally be at that point. It’s a long way to go, and obviously I will be adding new stuff as I move along, but for the first time in the nearly two years since I set out on this project, everything now has a home on the site, everything has the look I want, and it’s now ready to be populated. While not an official goal of mine, but I am hoping this will be the largest, most in-depth single-person storm chasing archive site in existence. And while this current version of the site is only two years old, I have had a home on the web for a couple decades in some capacity, so this has been a long-time coming.
That all being said, it’s a lot of garbly-gook, but given the quiet and me trying to get over whatever crud I have been carrying here, I wanted to make an appearance, update a few things that have been stewing along in the background for a while, and basically just say I am alive in whatever capacity this version of alive is, and that I am excited to spend some winter down time populating this new home I have been building.