25 Years on the Web: 1995 to 2020

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

This web site turned 25 years old in October of 2020. I wrote the first pages of this site and scanned its first images in at the WVIT computer labs in Montgomery, West Virginia in October of 1995. Since then, the site has grown to thousands of pages and images, and traffic continues to grow with each passing year. This site was first called The Lightning Page, and kept that name until moving to the wvlightning.com domain in 1998. From 1998 to 2007, the site grew under the West Virginia Lightning name before moving to its current domain, stormhighway.com. The name changes were simply that - the content remained intact through all of the different names. Some of the lightning pages in the library section are originals from 1995 (with some edits and enhancements added over the decades).

On a related note, in 2023 I will pass the 30 year mark in my storm chasing career. I posted a page marking that milestone here.

Site History

I wrote the first pages of this web site back in October of 1995 at the West Virginia Institute of Technology engineering computer lab in Montgomery, West Virginia (Google Street View). I did most of the hand-coded HTML and content writing on orange-screened, text-only monochrome dummy terminals connected to the school's network and Unix servers. For you non-IT readers, a dummy terminal is basically a keyboard and monitor connected to a central server on a network - IE, there was no CPU tower at each workstation. You would usually find these systems in department stores, auto repair shops and similar settings.

When I first wrote the site, then called The Lightning Page, I was still using ELM and Pine for email, Gopher was still an active source of information, and the best computers on campus were the 486s with Windows 3.1. For the most part, I wrote my pages blind on the dummy terminals, then later had to go to another (busier) lab to get a quick view on how they looked on normal browsers - in this case, Netscape running on the 486s. I used Lynx (a Unix text-only server-based browser) to preview the site on the monochrome terminals. That wasn't as bad of an inconvenience as it sounds, since the first site had no tables, few images and no real layout to speak of, just text and inline images.

In 1995, I did not own a computer, and would not until the spring of 1997. Until that time, the development of this site took place entirely in my spare time at the computer labs at WVIT. The lightning myths and lightning faq pages are two of the biggest original sections from the first version of this site. Despite revisions over the years, the 'meat' of most of that content was typed out on those monochrome terminals at WV Tech 25 years ago.

After I got my own computer and a dialup account in 1997, updating the web site took place over Telnet at the Unix shell prompt using the Pico text editor. I did everything server-side, except for FTPing image files as needed. I didn't start maintaining a local copy of the site and fully updating via FTP until 1998.

The first photo prints I scanned in 1995 were using a flatbed in a lab in Orndorff Hall (the only scanner on campus that I was aware of), resulting in 256-color GIF images. I had 8 or 10 photos on the site to start with. The first lightning photo I posted to the site was the one pictured at left that I captured on my first storm outing in July of 1993. This image is of the original scan. At that point, I only had three seasons of storm chasing under my belt, yet had a decently successful batch of lightning shots. Most of my early photos were from around Washington and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1993 to 1995.

The site remained on the WV Tech campus servers until mid-1997 before a brief switch to Cross Lanes-based wvinter.net (who later became Intelos) once I moved to Charleston and started working. Soon after I started my job at CIS in the spring of 1998, I registered the wvlightning.com domain, accordingly changed the name of the site to West Virginia Lightning and moved the site to the CIS server, where it has remained ever since. I registered stormhighway.com in 2006, switched to that new name/identity in 2007 and phased out wvlightning.com, which I still own but have not used since the switch. So there you have it, the 20-year history of this site.

The process of building this site during my time at WV Tech is the sole reason I ended up in the web development career field. I did my first web job on a school Co-op page, then when I moved to Charleston, began a nearly 2-year stint with the newspaper updating their site nightly before landing at CIS.

Old Site Designs

I have kept most of the old files from the previous versions of this site, all but the very first set of designs. The 1995 to 1997 versions unfortunately are lost forever, as they were backed up only on 3.5 inch floppies which are long gone (and probably would not work even if I still had them). archive.org does not have pages from those early versions, but I was able to retrieve two images from the 1996-1997 era, the header image and navbar that I made with a primitive 3D text program:

From 1997 onward, I have a good preservation of the versions of the site, despite a few of the graphics files being lost here and there. Aside from the 1997-1999 and 2002 screen captures, these thumbnails link to the actual, active html pages from that year's version, so you can go 'back in time' to see how this site looked in years past (and how horrendous and primitive early web design techniques were). The 1999 version shows the benefit of the purchase of the graphics program Paint Shop Pro (prior to that I was using mostly LView Pro). PSP was a great program that I used for design work up until 2007, when I finally moved to Adobe products (Photoshop and Flash). Even so, I still use Paint Shop for certain tasks that I think it does better/faster, such as quick photo resizing, logo overlays and JPEG exporting.

Yahoo Directory and Search Engines

In 1995, the Yahoo! Directory - at the time, the most popular search engine/directory on the internet - added a new 'Lightning' subsection to its weather category, and this site was the first and only listing for several months. Thanks to that link, I actually saw some of my highest all-time traffic for a year or so, until the Yahoo page started filling up with other lightning site listings. Thanks to archive.org, a screen capture is preserved:

LINK: Archive.org view of Yahoo! directory on April 26, 1997

I stopped getting traffic from the Yahoo link many years ago, as the directory lost popularity and West Virginia Lightning suffered from being alphabetically last in about 30 or so lightning site listings. The Altavista search engine then became the primary source of my visitors, and for many years this site was always a top result for the lightning keyword. Eventually Google came onto the scene, and now, like most sites, provides my biggest source of traffic. Today, the site gets less overall traffic than it did in those early years, mainly due to the fact that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of web pages on lightning and storm chasing online today.

Site Addresses (URLs)

This site was first hosted on WVNet servers at West Virginia Tech, but was moved several times before being transferred to its permanent home at the CIS servers in 1998. The following is a list of the URLs that this site has resided at since its inception:

1995-1996: https://olie.wvitcoe.wvnet.edu/~drobinso - West Virginia Tech (WVNET)
1996-1997: https://wvit.wvnet.edu/~djrobi - West Virginia Tech (WVNET)
1997-1998: https://wvinter.net/~daniel - WVInter.net (Now Intelos.net)
1998: https://wv-cis.net/~danr/lightning/ - CIS Internet
1998-2007: https://wvlightning.com - CIS Internet
2007-present: https://stormhighway.com - CIS Internet

Version history notes

The site - from day one - has always been hand-coded in static HTML pages, with most composition and edits done in Wordpad or Notepad. I have never used database-driven architecture, CMS (content management) systems (like Wordpress or Drupal) nor WYSIWYG software (such as Dreamweaver). Everything has been hand-crafted in raw HTML code, and all graphics are original and custom-made. CSS, in my opinion, was not a universally stable-enough platform to begin using until 2012.

1995-1996: Single-column layout, inline images. Edited server-side with Pico (UNIX)
1997-1998: Frames. Photos edited in Lview Pro.
1999: Javascript & tables architecture introduction, 640x480 minimum resolution-optimized. Switch to Paint Shop Pro for graphics/photos
2000: SSI architecture introduction (shtml)
2001: 800x600 minimum resolution-optimized
2006-2009: Incorporation of Flash elements
2007: Switch to Adobe Photoshop for graphics/photos
2010: 1024x768 minimum resolution-optimized
2012: CSS integration, conversion to PHP architecture.
2014: Responsive mobile-friendly architecture introduction