I have had a website for probably the last 10 years or so. My first site was magnumsdomain.com, which was a Dodge Dakota enthusiast site. That
site was fairly successfull. I was averaging between 200 and 300 visitors a day, and even had a paid advertiser. I really enjoyed doing
that site. After a couple of years of running that site, I sold my truck and just let the site go. At that time, I was going through a
career change and did not feel like there was a subject that I wanted to take the time to devote a website to. A couple of years later,
I found a subject.......meteorology.
I've always enjoyed meteorology, and somehow got the idea that I enjoyed taking pictures of storms. When I got a few photos
that I wanted to show off, I decided to create a weather website. I started this site back in September 4, 2003. On September 18, 2003 I purchased the hoosierweather.com domain. At that time,
there wasn't much to this site.......especially in the way of weather related content. There was an area for weather photos and I had a
webcam set up that would upload images every few minutes. For the first few years, this wouldn't change. Oh, the site went through
a few cosmetic changes, but that is about as deep as the changes went until about the last year or so
After looking into weather stations for a few years (they are a rather big ticket item), I decided it was time to finally
buy one. In March of last year, I purchased a Davis Vantage Pro2 weather station. It is a fairly robust piece of equipment. The station
has a console that display's current weather stats and history. The console is also connected to my server. This allows me to upload
weather stats to both this site and www.wunderground.com. While this provides current data and history, there is still the matter of
providing forecast data.
For a while, I had looked around to see if there was a software package that would provide me a way to upload weather forecast
and watches/warnings information. I did find a couple, but nothing that was really customizable, and especially nothing that was cheap
(or free). At that point, I decided to make my own. This gave me a chance to learn something, and has turned out to be quite fun. I've
come up with a program that I call HoosierCast. It's coded in c++ and runs on Linux. There are still many things that it doesn't yet do,
but that's the fun of it being my own project........I can make it to where it does all that I want it to do.
At the end of the day, this site is not a job for me, it is just a hobby. There may be times that this site doesn't get updated
as often as it should. What am I saying.....of course there will be. I'll get around to it when I can......remember......this is just a hobby. :)
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