Weather And Websites

A beautiful morning to start out the week as the much anticipated cold front is making itself very well known across the region with very chilly temps, some light rain, and blustery conditions. The models hang on to the closed low and keep these conditions around through Wednesday which makes me very happy given the earlier forecasts were hinting at this cool, wet weather only sticking around for today. Current forecasts have highs around 50 through Wednesday with overnight lows in the 30s! There is a chance, albeit slim for most of the Denver area, that overnight temperatures will be cold enough for snow flurries. Higher elevations south and west of town have a better shot of seeing this, but no accumulations of note expected anywhere west of the foothills.

Chase-wise, severe weather is expected in Oklahoma today as been talked about over the last few days. However, given the southeast OK targets and marginality of the setup, it wasn't justified to me to make such a lengthy trip. I see nothing today that seems overwhelmingly significant beyond a cold front enducing a nasty squall line. A couple of embedded supercells might spin up a nader, but today's main threat is winds with a shot or two of decent-sized hail.

The weather media nerd in me has been busy with multiple DVD/video projects over the last couple of weeks, but I have also been dabbing into some web work on some of the longer renders. I've been back at work with Wordpress and am currently trying to recreate the front page to tornadoeskick.com to basically make it the blog page.

My hope when all is said and done that my main page still has the slideshow, but the main page will be the blog itself. I am using Wordpress for this because of its customizability and the hope that I can make it part of the main page seemlessly and basically merge the front page and the blog to a one-stop shop. I am not doing any drastic redesigning of the site for this, its just an attempt to bring the most popular part of my site (the blog) to my front page in hopes of directing traffic to a center point on my site and let them branch out from there.

Because Wordpress does allow blog importing, I have every intention of bringing over the archives from blogger which as of this writing is well over 1,700 entries. Assuming I get everything to work, the biggest change will be the address of my blog which will go from the current blog.tornadoeskick.com to the main url of www.tornadoeskick.com.

Main features of the new main page will be the full blog, news slideshow, twitter, latest videos, latest chase logs, blog links, and other misc stuff.

Right now, I am aiming for a simple target date of January 1, 2010 as to when to launch this. My hope is to have it complete long before then, but my priority is knocking out the several DVD projects I am working on. I'm hopeful to have those out of the way by Halloween and will allow myself the early winter months to program my new front page/blog. Its entirely possible this could be running as soon as tomorrow, but only in a testing phase of it. Lots of work will be done to get it working as I want, thus the tentative Janusary 1 date is when I hope to have all the bugs worked out. With that said, don't be surprised if you see previews of it on the site between now and then.

So that's the scoop early on this Monday morning! Today is the last full day of summer, but don't tell Ma-Nature that. She's getting a jump start to fall a day early and I for one am lovin' her for it!

Oh, one last thing. I cancelled my MySpace account this morning. I'm a Facebook person and haven't used MySpace in forever. If you had me on MySpace, search for me at Facebook now!