Sci-Fi Storm started in October 2000 as an attempt to produce a news and commentary site similar to Slashdot. Even using the same web site source code with some customizations. But it was a bear to use and maintain, and I couldn’t do the cool things I wanted to do with it.

I’ve done a lot of programming and scripting, so I always had an intention of writing new software from scratch. Even did a fair amount of work on it, with some theming (no more pastels! That was an attempt at a 3D theme that was highly readable – the color scheme grew on me…). Some even saw the preview of “Storm 2.0″, but it requires a lot of time and effort to pull it off completely. And I constantly changed the language of choice – perl, php, ruby, ruby with rails…and I kept going back and forth using XML with XSLT vs. just rendering the data directly. I was making it too complex.

Now witness the rebirth…I gave up on personally writing it, and decided to utilize Wordpress, along with acustomized theme and some code. Storm 3.0. I’m making customizations here and there, especially tothe theme, which is borrowed from the Wordpress theme “pixel“, which I used because it has a nice aurora-like background.

I’m hoping this will allow better publishing power (I don’t have to write every article in HTML), and I also hope that additional editors will be able to join in and help out.

This place has always been a “labor of love”. It doesn’t generate much income – much less than the cost of operating the server it lives on. And over the nearly one decade of being online, it has been surpassed by various other younger web sites that had more muscle behind it. Maybe one day this site will leapfrog them…

If you’d like to support Sci-Fi Storm, you can do so easily by checking out the ads on the site, and purchasing anything via this link to Amazon, or any of the other links to products we mention here. As an Amazon associate, we receive a percentage of most every sale, and you don’t pay any more than you would otherwise!