Welcome!

Hello everybody, and welcome to weathertogether.net!

Thank you so much for stopping by! I had wanted to develop a unique weather website for a while, but I was always intimidated by how good other websites looked, and I had no idea how to code. Still, I thought I’d give it a shot. Hopefully you can forgive my rather clumsy formatting – I promise it will get better over time.

The purpose of this website has changed a bit since I first conceived of it earlier this spring. At first, I wanted to build a website that had weather links and embedded weather diagrams so that it was much easier to analyze the weather. Additionally, this website would allow me to organize my blogs in such a way that I could easily go back and revisit blogs from the past, as it seemed like the treasures I wrote back in my high school years had essentially become buried under an ever-increasing stack of new blogs. I also thought it would be great to have a map of webcams, because who doesn’t love webcams?

As time went on, my idea changed a bit, not necessarily because I had some new awakening, but just because I became aware of just how powerful WordPress was. I had always wanted to develop some sort of weather and science blogging community. At the very least, I thought it would be wonderful if there was a site where people could easily talk about the weather and make connections, whether for networking or for backcountry skiing. This had always seemed impossible to code and think through but thankfully, with WordPress, other people do the dirty work for you, and I was able to make my dream of an online weather community become a reality.

I always had so much fun writing my blog, but it was my blog, and I wanted to create something we could all partake in. I hope we can all create a fun weather and science community for everybody to enjoy.

Now that I got that out of the way, let me give you an introduction to this site.

Blog

The home page is my blog. I imported all my posts from my Blogger account, and although there are some formatting issues, they are all here. I may get around to reformatting them at some point, but who knows.

Community

This is the page I am most excited about. Here, you can see the site activity, site members, and forums. Note that the activity is also on the sidebar on the right, but the standalone activity page is much more pleasant to read.

Setting up your profile

To become a member, you simply click on the “register” button in the top left corner of the page.

This will direct you to a form where you can, well, register.

After this, you’ll get the familiar “Check Your Email To Activate Your Account!” Be sure to check your spam if you don’t see it in your inbox.

After everything is activated, you can go back to the site and log in!

Once you are logged in, you can click on the “Howdy, (insert name here)” in the upper right-hand corner, and it will take you to your profile.

Once you are at your profile, you can do a variety of different things. You can check activity, edit your profile, read notifications, check your forum posts, and modify your settings.

One thing I should note: while there are those mandatory profile questions you must answer at the beginning (Basic Info), they are by no means the only profile questions. You can also answer additional questions by going to “Profile” and clicking on “Personal Info.” I may add more of these “Profile Groups” and questions the future. Additionally, you can give yourself a profile photo and a cover image!

Once you have set up your profile, introduce yourself in the Introductions Forum. I’m excited to get to know you!

Webcams

I’m very excited about the webcams page. It uses clickable scalable vector graphics (SVG) to organize webcams by country, and, in some cases, by state or territory. I have a lot of webcams for Washington thus far, but few for other U.S. areas, and none outside of the U.S. That will change!

Toolbox

Here, you will find both links and embedded, automatically updating meteorological information. I have some ideas for further development down the road, but this will do for now.

Reading Room

The Reading Room has two things: all of my blogs organized by category (you can also find this on the sidebar), and standalone pages that go in detail about certain concepts. Want to learn about El Nino? How about thermonuclear energy? You can find far more detailed explanations of certain phenomena here than you can in my blogs. Granted, the few standalone pages up now are altered from blogs or created heavily relying on my blogs as a past resource, but this will change. I’d like to transform this into some sort of wiki page into the future, but let’s get all the basics settled first.

About

Self explanatory. I’d recommend you read the history of this website, as you can see my first post and see some pretty funny reactions from my peers during the major snowstorm of December 2008.

I’m really excited about this (in case you couldn’t already tell), and I hope you are too.

Thanks so much,
Charlie