Welcome back to my world on the web! After over a decade, I have decided to bring my old website back to life. For nearly 20 years, starting in the late 90s, I had a website constantly updated with chase logs and other severe weather information. But as the era of social media took over, websites became less and less viewed. For many years in the end, I tried various methods to keep my site relevant, changing templates, even going from chase-specific to a more professional/video template.
JUMP TO A SECTION
THE HISTORY – THE END OF AN ERA – THE INSPIRATION – THE PROCESS
THE CHASE LOGS – THE FUTURE – THE CONCLUSION
THE HISTORY
My original website went online at Geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/9655 I believe in 1999 as I partnered up with an old buddy, Josh. I learned basic HTML to write up a site that mainly hosted my early lightning pictures, particularly through the first couple years of the new millennia.
As I learned more and more coding, I moved to my own server, bringing tornadoeskick online. Early versions of the site included a green/gold color combo with some uh… unique graphic and visual choices. I was big into Super Mario and wolves, both ended up a noticeable part of the mid-2000s sites.
As the 2000s drew on, I was introduced to WordPress and the freedom it allowed to do a lot of really cool things. I changed over my site, changed the color scheme to my Ohio high school colors, red and black, and brought the rookie years into a more modern appearance. I also dove deep into the backend of the site, coding widgets that allowed me quick updates from the road with just a click or two of the mouse, updating certain items across the entire site as opposed to page-by-page.
The wordpress version held for several years, but as I got deeper into chasing, particularly with TWISTEX, time limitations as well as some restrictions on posting while filming for the ‘Storm Chasers’ show, left the site very stagnate. After Discovery ended and TWISTEX disbanded, I found myself with a little more time, but the El Reno tragedy in 2013 sidelined a lot of drive to reinvigorate my site.
After a year or so, I decided to change gears all together, focusing my site on stock video, and eventually a more professional page. Neither really took off, and after several failed attempts to get the site back to life, I realized my efforts were not going to materialize and made the tough decision to close down my site and let the domain expire in early 2018.
THE END OF AN ERA
At some point in early 2018, despite the multiple surges of money I invested, I just stopped investing the effort. My site, which had laid pretty dormant for years now, finally saw its end in 2018 when I cancelled the subscriptions for the web service and let my original tornadoeskick domain name lapse. After nearly 20 years, I no longer had a home on the web.
At this point, social media took over, and that’s pretty much where any sharing of my chasing career was left. And while the snippets and images shared certainly were worthy of those shares, I no longer had an archive for my chasing. Just folders that sat largely unviewed on my computer, backed up in triplicate only to resurface on important anniversaries.
Then in 2024, the idea began to creep back into the picture.
THE INSPIRATION
There were two things that came together last summer (2024) to inspire this project…
First was the investment I decided to make in digitizing my collection of physical tapes. I wanted to do this as I had been involved with numerous projects that were talking about my career, so I needed to gather a lot of material from my early days. I sent off over 70 that included my earliest chases dating back to 2001 through about 2009, including a lot of my earliest and best tornado chases, along with the first couple years chasing as part of TWISTEX. About 90% of the tapes were mine, while the remaining few were tapes from Tim Samaras and Carl Young during the 2008 TWISTEX season. While a lot of the storm/tornado clips were in my digital archive already, it was a lot of the lower-end chases and more ‘behind-the-scenes’ stuff that I didn’t have anywhere else.
Secondly, I was involved in a discussion talking about chaser websites, and how many of the OG chasers sites had gone offline over the years. Very few remain online, and even fewer remain active. As you know, I am one of those whose once very active site went offline, and thus so did a lot of my chasing career.
Those two factors combined to give me the idea that perhaps, I try to bring my site back to life, and thus the spark was there…
THE PROCESS
The initial steps were to gather any and all backups of my previous sites, dating back to the early 2000s, which were scattered among various hard drives. Most of my active chase log years were prior to 2008 when I had a constant online presence, and I wanted to get all those collecting and put into one place. I also was faced with finding a web host, a working theme, and updating my knowledge on web development, something I haven’t done in depth for over a decade. A lot had changed, and I needed to get up to speed on customizing themes, tweaking code, etc. This was the longest part of the launching process, trying to find the look and design of my site. I went through various themes, testing them out in a limited capacity, until I finally settled on the theme I wanted. Then came the coding, make the site do what I wanted. Oddly enough, this was easier AND harder as a lot of the code I figured I was going to need to write was already in some capacity part of the theme. Nothing too outlandish, but other than some minor customizations to the existing framework, most of what I wanted the code to do was already part of the theme.
One of the biggest surprises/disappointments was how much was paywalled via subscriptions. Back a decade or so when WordPress was relatively new (albeit well into it’s life), one could learn to code or pay a small, one-time fee to buy a plugin or widget that would handle what it is I wanted to do. Now, it seems everything is locked behind subscriptions, even small widgets are only available as part of a larger subscription plan. It added up pretty quick. Unfortunately the theme I chose was not one that was easy to go in and code, and fortunately a lot of what I wanted to do was built-in to the theme, a few things I wanted/needed were outside sourced, and were not one-time purchases. But alas, I got to a point where most of what I wanted to implement was in place. Once the technical stuff was in place, I had a much easier time with the look of my site, choosing the color scheme and various other tweaks. I was happy with the look, and that meant it was time for the fun part…
THE CHASE LOGS
My main focus on this site is telling the stories of chasing. Those come in the form of chase logs, the write ups of various chase days. And not just the big ones, but the smaller, sometimes non-event days. It’s a diary of sorts for a chase, sharing the good, bad, and everything in between. With all the technical aspects in place, now it was time to generate the content. On paper, the first move could’ve been to just import the backed up chase logs from previous sites. The main issue is while the text was an easy transfer, most of the images did not exist, and those that did were not of a quality I want to post now. This is where the digitizing of old tapes comes in; and where this process has dragged on.
I also had the problem that from roughly 2009 on, there were no actual write-ups. During the Discovery Channel era, we were not allowed to share details of our chases due to the TV show being in production. That virtually eliminated most if not all the TWISTEX-era chases from being shared, and even outside of that, I just didn’t keep up very well. After about 2012 when I shifted the focus of my old site from chase logs to a more business site, I never did write-ups. Aside from a few DVD chapters that got posted online in recent years plus snippets shared on my social media, a lot of the chasing from 2009 to the present day just never really saw the light of day. So in addition to pulling in former copies of old chase logs, I tasked myself with created new ones.
I divide my chase log archiving into four categories…
ORIGINAL LEGACY CHASES (2001-2007): Chase logs posted to older sites that I am copying over to the new one with updated imagery. I don’t do much editing to these as I want to leave them as close to the original as I can. The only edits would be grammatical edits or typos, and the occasional correction of something stated in the log. In some cases, I had ADDED new content which may include additional pictures or info that was not present in the original post. A lot of this stems from how I often neglected to post more behind-the-scenes stuff or other info I didn’t consider terribly relevant then which I do more so now. A minority of those logs are posted now, but many more to come as I update imagery from this era of chasing.
TWISTEX-ERA (2007-2011): The only public release of any of these chases (outside of what was shown on Discovery Channel) was in my DVD releases back in the day, which I did up til 2011. Even then, most of those were private home viewings, most of these never got posted in any capacity online. Some earlier DVDs got YouTube releases, but most of the TWISTEX-era stuff has been relatively unposted and unshared. These were a top priority to me, particularly our big days, and these require the most work as I am pulling in content from multiple sources in order to better share those events. As these get posted, you’ll see all kinda of fun stuff, including some behind-the-scenes secrets of the Discovery Channel show you probably don’t know.
In addition to TWISTEX-specific chasing logs, I hope to show what it was like being a part of that team and share my experiences on what it was like chasing with the guys and what it was like being part of a reality TV show. This section, as much as I imagine will be one of the most heavily viewed, will probably take some time as the content I want to share is scattered about in many more places, and will just take time to get put out in addition to just updating that era of chasing logs.
LOST LEGACY ERA (2008-2021): While the years cover the same as TWISTEX, I had many chases that were NOT with the team. But this era represents the biggest void of chasing logs that I have. Particularly after TWISTEX, so much of this era was largely absent from public posts. Raw YouTube videos and snippets shared on social media are all that really was shared from this time. After 2011, I had stopped making DVDs/Blurays and thus even that medium for sharing chases was gone. And with no real effort into writing up logs, all of the chases in this era were pretty much undocumented, and that included some biggies.
This represents the largest amount of work that has been done and largely remains. Chases like Pilger (2014), Dodge City (2016), and Carpenter (2017) have never been written up prior, and now they’re online, written up for the first time. Many of my biggest chases that took place during that stretch of time are online or soon will be. The work to write those up was immense, using old social media posts, GPS logs, watching video minute-by-minute to best capture the mood and tone of those chases, meticulously looking for details so I could map out a chase day minute-by-minute, mile-by-mile, to comprehensively detail those HUGE events as best I could years after the fact to try to be as authentic as I could. A lot of the imagery from those days had NEVER been posted in any capacity before, so I am super excited to see many of those big days FINALLY being shared in the way I want them to.
ACCUWEATHER ERA (2021-Present): A mix between sharing posts from this ongoing season plus the previous few seasons. I started to get a little more involved in posting some of these chases in other forums, and these are a bit easier to write-up. Obviously this era also includes some huge days, including Sycamore (2021), Ottumwa (2023), Akron (2023), and Yuma (2023), among others. As with the other eras, many of these days that are not live yet will be as I go along, plus I am working hard to ensure I stay as caught up on the current season as I can, writing up logs as I go along through the season.
THE FUTURE
In addition to the continuous addition of chase logs, both current and former, I will be working on adding content to additional sections of my site, including my coverage of tropical systems (a new part of chasing for me since AccuWeather), write-ups covering some of the celestial events I’ve seen, as well as other bits and pieces of my weather career. I imagine this process will take a long time, perhaps infinite to get all caught up. I am prioritizing the chasing logs, particularly the bigger tornado chases both solo and with TWISTEX, as well as some of the lower-end TWISTEX chases, former legacy logs, and of course, my current chasing. The other sections will come with time, some may see a piece or two added as anniversaries come around, but right now, my biggest focus is and will be the storm chasing.
There are other ideas that are simmering away on the stove of my brain, including adding a blog of some sorts, some integration of my social media pages into the site, as well as other sections or pages. Outside the site, particularly on my YouTube channel, I will be updating old videos and uploading new compilations of older chases, trying to clean up previous uploads and adding footage that never made the original cut.
As for the site itself, it’s my hope that I can maintain not only the site, but the motivation to keep it going. As you can imagine, this is a HUGE investment of time and money to do. For nearly six years, I pumped money into keeping up a site that I never invested the effort in until I finally let it die in 2017. I don’t want to see this site suffer the same fate. I have already put in so much of my time and money that I want this passion project to grow and remain as it will be one of so very few active storm chaser sites left on the web.
Many of you may remember the old URL (tornadoeskick.com), which I lost to one of those entities that buys old URLs. It remains unavailable to this day, and certainly not at a price I am willing to pay to get it back. Perhaps someday, I will re-acquire it, or perhaps utilize some variation of it, but right now, it is very low on my priority scale and I’m not too upset over it.
As for revenue, right now I have NO PLANS to sock in a bunch of ads to try and generate revenue. I think they ruin sites, and I don’t want to distract you all from what this site if online for. However, I have made a page to accept donations in hopes that perhaps what I am doing is important enough for you that you would consider helping keep it live. The annual cost for a web server plus the domain registration is enough on its own, but I would love to be able to update to better servers for fast performance, perhaps register additional domains, and of course, just keep the site active and online for as long as possible, so I ask of you to consider shooting over a few bucks every now and then. All those donations will go straight back to this site, no profits are intended to be made from this. It’s a passion project, but one of considerable investment of time and money. And any little bit outside of me is super helpful.
THE CONCLUSION
So there you go, the history of my site and all that culminated to get us where we are today. I thank you so much for being here, and I hope that my efforts are worth something to you all. While a lot of this has been inspired by you guys, this is mostly a ‘me’ passion project, something that offers me an outlet, a hobby, and a chance to get back into something I have always enjoyed, designing and maintaining a website. In the end, I don’t know where this will ultimately go, but for now and the foreseeable future, there is a lot to tell, and hopefully that’ll forever be a reason to keep coming back to my little home on the web.
Welcome back for the first time again… I hope you enjoy your stay..
