New tools for my 32nd year of blogging

I like to say that I've been blogging about weather for 32 years. What I mean is that I've always been interested in documenting and sharing my thoughts on the weather, be it locally where I am or worldwide.

You may have noticed recently that the design for my blog (and, in fact AccuWeather.com in its entirety) has changed. We also have a new back-end tool that will allow me to do more, better multimedia blogs more efficiently. This entry tests some of those capabilities.

In January 1985, at age 10, the only way I could do this was to type up, or literally write, my thoughts on paper. I created a fake newspaper business and made my mom and dad read the paper each day. The first issue was "SUB-ZERO TEMPERATURES CAUSE CHAOS" -- and detailed the North Carolina and Southeast cold outbreak of January 1985 at my home in North Carolina. (The photo below is from me writing a different article about the snow in April 1987.)

During college in the 1990s, I reported the weather through email lists. Ten years after that first paper "blog," my first online blog launched, talking about a severe thunderstorm that hit Asheville, North Carolina, the day after I graduated with my degree in meteorology.

Twenty years after that first paper blog, I wrote my first blogs on AccuWeather.com as Hurricane Katrina formed in 2005. Since then, I've written 4,236 blogs for AccuWeather, featuring 14,874 images. Today, I recommit to bringing you the best, fairest weather reporting I can in the years to come. As I always say "The Weather Is Always Interesting."

The new blogging software allows us to easily insert videos. For example, here's an interesting video about Oymyakon, Siberia, Russia, the coldest town on Earth:

Or, I could bring in a slideshow (created by one of our news writers) for weather-inspired Christmas gifts: