If you request a link, make sure your page reflects a definite SKYWARN subject. Please don't ask me to link herein a general weather-related links site, for example. That is not SKYWARN as I wish to list them in these pages. For the purposes of the Index To SKYWARN Web Pages on the Internet, a "SKYWARN" site will have at least something of each of the following contained upon it:
SKYWARN is an National Weather Service program of trained severe weather spotters who contact their local NWSFO and/or their local Emergency Management when they spot signs of severe weather in their local areas. They may be ham, or non-ham, too.
A SKYWARN site can have ham radio links...or not. A SKYWARN site may also have weather-related links...or not. However, the subject matter must be SKYWARN-related, or have at least a paragraph of SOMETHING Skywarn in there. If it's a list of JUST weather-related links (such as radar sites, forecast sites) and yet nothing relating to SKYWARN ... then it is NOT actually SKYWARN-related. As well, placing a link in the upper corner of your page to the National SKYWARN Home Page doesn't cut it, either. That does not make you "SKYWARN" - any more than a link to the Natl. Audubon Soc. web page makes you "Audubon." It confuses me, so I KNOW it would confuse my users, as well, when they try to decipher which sites are legitimite SKYWARN sites and which ones just want to loosely associate the SKYWARN name and really have nothing to do with SKYWARN at all.
I've had people ask me to link to their pages when they contained an ARES logo, a RACES logo, a SKYWARN logo, and yet, no links to click on to go anywhere, and which contained no textual descriptions, no contact information - basically...just a pretty picture on a page that did nothing, and who then got mad at me when I refused to link to their page. Your page must have some SKYWARN-RELATED USEFULNESS to people in order to be linked herein. This is not a list of membership brags, nor is it a list of personal pages of people who happen to be SKYWARN spotters. If that is what you think, you're missing the point and the idea.
I have to impose limits, here. If every site on the web contained ONLY a Natl. SKYWARN Home Page link and then, because of only that, wanted to be listed here, then my job would become rediculously difficult and practically impossible to keep up with because now every site on the web that contained even remotely weather-related information - including, say, sites like Peet Brothers, Davis Instruments, and The Weather Channel - would now be considered a "SKYWARN" site.
Believe it or not, I actually have had quite a number of commercial interests in the past (no, not the ones mentioned above) use exactly the tactics that I described above and then try to get me to link to their site here ... and I refused. I'm sure commercial interests might have a different point of view, certainly (just as spammers always tell you that what they are filling your mailbox with is not "spam," too - they have their own unique and, shall I say, "brainlessly religious" way of thinking that cannot be changed). But, I'm sorry. These are just my rules. You may well be a famous storm chaser, or a TV met, or a 20-year NWS met with a Doctorate in twenty different subjects; but if your site does not contain SKYWARN-specific information, I just can't qualify it for a listing, here.
So, please make sure that the web page you want me to link to has a subject matter definitely and obviously devoted to (as in, not simply mentioning) SKYWARN. If you pass that test, I'll link to your page. But, I'll only take legitimite, SKYWARN-dedicated links, in here.
Thanks.
Todd Sherman, Webmaster
Index To SKYWARN Web Pages on the Internet