Watching the Skies

Contact Information

You may contact me at weather@watchingtheskies.com

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 to Texas 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.

I am a professional in the IT industry with A+ certification and several years experience. I have done everything from helpdesk phone support to small business consulting 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, its an expensive hobby though. I graduated high school in Tampa, Florida

I listen to most any/all rock music first and foremost, then dance/techno songs. I have a particularly strong dislike to loud annoying high pitched flutes playing solo for a half hour, and rap.

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.

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 version 3. I got the inspiration from political website designs that I was involved in. Perhaps my most professional layout to date.

v. 4 | November 1,2008: MS Sharepoint Services 3.0: With the relocation to Texas, I decided it was time to investigate more feature filled web capabilities that didn’t require as much maintenance. I decided to give Windows Sharepoint Services a try, since the software is offered freely by Microsoft. It didn’t last long.

v. 5 | May 2, 2009: WordPress: I learned from the mistakes of using sharepoint and went with WordPress, a far superior product. Version 5 is the current version of my website.