So, here it is, friends! The new website! This is now running on the latest version of WordPress and the latest version of PHP, too. This is a major upgrade and overhaul from the previous site.
Out with the Old…
The last site was built in 2013 and went – mostly – unchanged for seven years. I’d patch this and update that… but there was never any major renovations. That meant it was using seven year old code to serve you the latest available forecasts. It was a bit like driving door-to-door in a 1987 Toyota Tercel to sell Virtual Reality headsets.
So, seeing the writing on the wall, I started working on this site.
In February.
I would’ve likely finished by May had the Gulf Coast not suffered through a Spring Severe Weather Season that was one of the most active in nearly a decade. Then the goal was August! And the area plowed right into the most active Hurricane Season on record.
October? Oh, yeah, the Pandemic, too.
You know, it is crazy. After building the last one back in 2013, I thought building this next one was going to be about as easy.
It was not.
In with the new…
The new site is built on a 32 Core AMD Opteron Processor, 64GB of RAM with four redundant RAID SSDs utilizing the latest MySQL, PHP, HTML, and CSS scripts. The site is fresh. It is clean. It still has that ‘new code’ smell.
Is it perfect? No. Sadly, it is not.
It was time to make the move, though. The old site was getting pretty sluggish at times and I know I heard for a handful of you occasionally noting that the site was “unavailable” or “didn’t work” when you tried to view a post.
Plus, this new server doesn’t play nice with the older code I was using.
In fact, there are many parts of this new website I am still struggling to develop, perfect, and finish. But, due to jumping to a new server, I was forced – in a way – to ‘go live’ with this site as it sits.
You may notice a few big changes.
First off, this site isn’t nearly as sharp as the last site. I had a fair bit of help with the last one from people who knew a lot about design. This time, not as much.
Secondly, I changed the permalink structure so the name of the article is now the link. So you won’t have to guess what the link is talking about anymore.
Lastly, it is still a work in progress. And there may be minor (or major) changes in the coming weeks. So buckle up!
And if you are poking around and you notice images are too big, font is too small, or something you used to read is missing… I’m probably still in the process of fixing it. If you have a minute (and care enough), you can let me know!
As always, thank you for stopping by to learn more about our planet, the atmosphere and what makes the weather happen!
Today’s Severe Risk
Today’s Tornado Risk
