You Don't Need a Vane to Know Which Way the Wind Blows

It's strange knowing that, for the first time since my last semester of college, I don't have to get out of bed and scour the skies for some interesting weather blurb to share with a few thousand of my closest friends.

I could go on some lengthy rant about what happened and what they did and what the seven thousandth iteration of that website means on a larger scale, but who benefits from that, or even cares, really? New York blogger meta only appeals to New York bloggers, and New York bloggers don't seem to understand that.

The only thing I could do on Tuesday—since I had nothing else to do!—was to think about how much it meant to me to be able to help, inform, and entertain so many people for so long. I managed to run a successful weather blog on a gossip website for two years. That's pretty cool. The Vane was the opportunity of a lifetime, and it was an incredible experience to share the good word of the atmosphere with people who didn't think they cared.

My goal, both there and talking about it in general, is to make people love the weather as much as I do. I focused on that point in the introduction of my book, The Extreme Weather Survival Manual, which I wouldn't have had the opportunity to write had I not written for The Vane. That blog gave me a start to my life, and even though the blog was abruptly shuttered today, its benefits will live on for what I hope is a long career somewhere bigger and better.

Weather on Gawker was a weird fit to say the least, but I made it work to the tune of more than a quarter of a million readers every month. Last month—my last month, as it turns out—saw nearly 900,000 unique visitors from around the world thanks in large part to my coverage of record-breaking Hurricane Patricia. There were days when my weather posts were sandwiched in between the tabloidiest posts imaginable, and a post about warm temperatures sat at the top of Gawker for an entire day when the site went quiet during the "incident" this summer. I didn't belong there—they knew it, I knew it, the readers knew it—but, for reasons long ago I decided not to question, they continued to let me write about the weather almost every day for nearly two years.

I'm a better person for it.

I passed on the potential to write a brief "thank you" note on The Vane to close out the blog, as they indicated they just wanted to rip off the bandaid and stop the introspective meta nonsense that's plagued Gawker for so long. (That'll be the day.) Finishing the blog with a long, detailed post about the latest November storm seemed like the right way to go out, anyway.

What I would have said is a big thank you to everyone who read The Vane, whether you were a dedicated visitor or read my posts every once and a while. The internet is a cesspool of bad opinions, but every comment thread on that blog fostered good, productive discussions, and that's especially hard to achieve in the Gawkersphere. The discussions and compliments meant the world to me, and I knew it was worth it every time I read a thank you note from someone who said I helped them stay ahead of a storm or understand a complex weather event.

That chapter is over, now. The events of late are trivial in the long run. As long as there's active weather, I'll be right there covering it, whether it's here or somewhere bigger and better than I can imagine. I'm excited to see what the future holds.

[Image: Tim Sheerman-Chase via Flickr]