You may contact me at weather@watchingtheskies.com
I won't give you my real e-mail because listing e-mails on websites is an invitation to spam.
Here is my story. My name is Sean Toner, I maintain this domain name and website because I am a weather & photography enthusiast, as well as a computer geek. I have owned this domain since 2004 and love having my own share of the internet. I am currently located in Frisco, Texas near the Stonebriar Mall. I moved up here in November 2008 mainly for a job, but also to storm chase and see somewhere new. I am a Florida native and lived just about everywhere in the Tampa Bay area at one point in time.
As I said previously I have a fascination with weather, photography and computer technology and with this website I can tie it all together. I have a bit of creativity in me as well which helps me create website like this. Severe afternoon storms, cold fronts and sunsets make for some of the greatest pictures.
All content on this site is original and created by me, except for the infrared and radar images on my weather pages. I can't quite afford a doppler radar or orbiting weather satellite just yet, give me time though. All pictures on this website including the header above and in the galleries are taken by me. I will keep this site advertisement free for as long as I can breathe too, I hate internet ads and mal ware plus I don't need a few extra pennies per day for banner ads on my low traffic site.
I am a professional in the IT industry with A+ certification and several years experience. I have done everything from helpdesk phone support to visiting multiple business clients per day on-site. I can resolve most server and desktop issues that have come up on the Windows platform. I am still learning the Linux distributions however, not quite good enough to do much troubleshooting.
I am a student pilot when I can afford it and so far have about 20 hours done. Was about 2 or 3 hours from my first solo flight!
Graduated high school in Tampa, Florida with a GPA just good enough not to be held back. I sucked at school but seem to do just fine in real life, go figure.
I listen to most any/all rock music first and foremost, then dance/techno songs, and so on, strong dislike to loud annoying high pitched flutes playing solo for a half hour, most country music and most rap. (By the way, I listen to the rhythm of music usually, not the lyrics.)
Here is a brief description of the websites I have designed in the past, and when available you can see the actual layouts. Not all the links will work on these old sites, naturally I no longer support these sites, so why bother updating them?
v. 1 | Late 1997: FrontPage Express: My first homepage went up, then down in 2 weeks. It sucked. It was all one big page that took forever to load because everything was on it. The only way to navigate around it was using bookmarks.
v. 2 | Early - Mid 1998: FrontPage 98: My second one went up, sucked also, but really wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be, at least at the time it wasn't. It had a top frame and a side frame for navigation.
v. 3 Beta 1 | Mid - Late 1998: FrontPage 98: My Third page almost made it up but I decided against putting it up because it was really terrible. it had a top and bottom frame and took forever to load and wasn't that good looking either. I later called it Beta 1.
v. 3 Beta 2 | January 1999 / v. 3 Beta 3 | January 1999: FrontPage 98: I made Beta 2 and 3. Beta 2 was designed after Windows NT and I thought it looked kind of neat in its own way, but I had a 49-51 vote against it to Beta 3. Beta 3 was black and red, and I thought it was ok, but not as good as I would of liked it. Both of them also never made it on the net.
v. 3 Beta 4| June 1999: FrontPage 98: I created a page with 6 frames, to imitate internal frames because I didn't know how to do it. It was very simple looking, the main page was my info on who I am, nothing more, and I liked it for about 3 days, then gave up on it. But it made it on the net somehow.
v. 4 | July 1999: FrontPage 98: I created a page, hoping I wouldn't get tired of it like I did every other one within one month, I gave up on frames, not because they are too complicated, but because sometimes it's better to just leave them out of the picture completely. I think this page, now looks good but later I may change my mind.
v. 5 Beta 2| March 2000: Dreamweaver 3: I created a new web page with internal frames, not at all like the old v. 4 page, and it sucked for that very reason. It had virtually no color on the page other than gray and red. Beta 1 had been divided in half to provide a navigation segment, Beta 2 implemented the navigation outside the internal frame.
v. 6 | May 2000: Dreamweaver 3: I decided to modify my old v. 4 as to change the colors and make internal frames so it wouldn't be so similar to my previous page. Lets see how the peanut gallery views it.
v. 7 | October 23. 2000: Dreamweaver 3: The peanut gallery didn't like it. It still didn't hold a candle to v. 4 which kicked the llamas ass. This version I'm making as its contender, more modern color scheme, and layout, yet as simple and easy to navigate as v. 4 was. Submit your ideas if you want!
v. 8 | October 1, 2001: Dreamweaver 4/MX: Layout design on front page by chrisxtreme, site proofed by fedsilence (formerly webacid). This site is proving to be a real success, not receiving as many hits ('cause the address has changed) but people like it a lot more than any previous site. It looks graphically appealing, soft subtle colors, and so on...I got inspiration to design my site like this from a series of Nissan commercials run in mid to late 2001. Now it seems as if commercials are copying my site layout, and modifying them for use on TV, and I like it.
v. 9 | February 15, 2003: Dreamweaver 4: This site is the most graphically complex in my series, offering better rollover images, more effective and versatile layout plus an easy color scheme. I expect high ratings with this particular release of my site. The blue square idea from my previous page was an awesome success, had an awesome layout but I simply outgrew it. With an ever-popular webcam, a guestbook and a poll, and especially with the recent edition of my own personal weather station, there was no room left with my old layout. My logic is, if something requires a major update, you mind as well start from scratch cuz you'll spend just as much time on it and get more effectiveness. Thus I designed this site. I decided to stray from the traditional black background I have chosen on all of my previous websites and go with a standard white.
| About the watchingtheskies.com website series: |
v. 1 | June 28, 2004: Dreamweaver MX 2004: This website uses the same layout as seanqpter 9 did, I just updated the links and names to say watchingtheskies.com instead. I never got to use this layout much but I have always liked it. I had to remove alot of the things I had on it previously, such as the weather station and the webcam, simply because of where I live (the weather station wont work at all) and the fact that my webcam has broke and I haven't gotten a new one. Not too much to describe in this description, most of the describing you can find in the seanqpter v.9 text, it's the same layout.
v.2 | October 10, 2005: Dreamweaver MX 2004: This site was more of a placeholder than an actual site, I designed a Flash animation to use as navigation on my potential website but later decided it was impractical. Not much to see other than my experiment with Flash.
v. 3 | October 7, 2006: Dreamweaver 8: Nearly a year after I attempted to create version 2, I made this site. I got the inspiration from political website designs that I was involved in. Perhaps my most professional layout to date.