New Weather Page

We are excited about our new updated weather page at uscity.net. It is really cool. We have all been checking it out and so far, everyone loves it! I love the satellites – the looping so you can get an idea of how the storm or weather system is moving and how fast it is coming towards you. The animated pages are excellent.

Everyone here agrees that one of the most important and probably will be the most used feature is at the top of the page where you can type in a city or zip code and get the current conditions, and a forecast for that area. Carol can’t wait to use this when she goes on vacation. Just type in Honolulu and find out what it will be like when you get there. (just kidding, she isn’t going to Hawaii … yet).

Kristina was impressed with the projected path of Tropical Storm Ernesto which was headed our way yesterday. There was an hour by hour projected path that was great. We are all very happy with this new updated version of our weather page – and you can click on a link at the top of any of our uscity.net pages to get there. Go check it out and let us know what you think!

And while you are there, this would be a great place to just let us know what you think about our site in general. We are always looking for ways to update it and make our site the best directory we possibly can.

Miss Pam

My View of How It All Began

This is actually a reprint of something out of Miss Pam's blog, but I have had a couple of people ask about it, so here it is on the "official"uscity.net employee blog spot:

It has been a crazy week – our assistant database manager - went on a cruise and I have been doing her work and mine too. She is the best – and I realized this week how much she does without ever making a big deal of it. Thank You Carol ;-) I love you!

As I promised when I started this blog, here is a little bit about…



My View of How It All Began

This began as the brainchild of our founder, Rusty Crawford – who I like to refer to as the ‘father’ of USCity.net. He is a genius who always seems to be one step ahead of everyone else I know. He taught himself basic programming language in the early 1980’s. About ten years later, Rusty taught himself HTML and Perl coding, Rusty started building websites for businesses in and around Volusia County, Florida.

That was when he came up with the idea for a local county-oriented business directory called Volusia.com (incidentally, that is where I first started working with Rusty and his wife, Mary). At Volusia.com we listed local governments, schools, wrote histories of the area towns and answered numerous emails about the area.

At the time, Yahoo only linked to Volusia.com, our information site, but would not link to any of our business sites. So sprang the idea of a nationwide directory of the United States.

And this took a LOT of preliminary preparation. One of the aspects I was involved with was finding and typing in the names of every county, city and town in the United States. I know there was a lot of programming and behind the scenes work then, but I really don’t know what all was involved then.

I know that he wanted a ‘G’ rated directory that would allow smaller ‘Mom & Pop’ businesses to be found on the web along with the larger companies like Disney, Dell and Sharper Image.

I believe that Rusty, his wife Mary, Sue and I were the first four employees. With a lot of trials and tests, we finally got it! We got our second server, dedicated just for uscity.net in 1999 and went online (we now have 25 servers).

In the beginning, much of the coding and data entry was done 51 times – once for every state and Washington D.C. Often that process fell in my lap and I sometimes felt a little bit like a robot. One compliment I remember Rusty giving me was calling me up one night and asking me if I was working or not, because he thought another computer was trying to get into our site. I told him "NO, it's just your human robot working away!"

We took every effort to make USCITY.NET a safe place to browse and shop (and still do!) and we added information that would be helpful to our users along with businesses, both local and national.

We all work very hard to bring you to bring you the best directory in the United States.

Everyone in our company takes pride in their work and we all want this to be a directory that is practical, easy to use and helpful to our visitors.

We welcome comments and suggestions to make your experience even more pleasurable.We all work very hard to bring you to bring you the best directory in the United States.

My Gym is Closing!

When I learned that the Leach Center would be closed for the next two weeks, I was crushed. What was I to do; two weeks without a gym workout, how was I to thrive?

See, the Leach Center is the student gym at Florida State University, and being the exercise nut that I am, I wasn’t quite sure what to do.

But than I realized, about 3 or 4 months prior to my present upset, I participated in a 5k race, and came in 2nd (out of the girls participating) with a time of 20:03 (meaning 20mins and 3seconds). For my placement, I received one Free Cici’s Pizza Dinner (that I still have yet to use), and a 3 months membership to Women’s World.

Women’s World was the ticket to my gym crisis. I figured, I would go and they would have exercise classes and maybe some dumbbells. That would do for the next two weeks. To my surprise, though, it was a ‘fully-loaded’ gym; I really love this place. Not only do they offer classes and dumbbells, but also they have treadmills, elliptical machines, bikes, and a few other cardio machines; they have a sauna, a tanning bed, the typical exercise machines and so much more.

I didn’t think things could get better than the Leach, but Women’s World may have just done it for me. Although, I don’t think I will renew at the end of my 3 month period, due to the student gym, after school, I will need to have a gym membership somewhere. And wherever my life may ‘run’, I hope it has a Women’s World Gym.Kristina

I enjoy working out and being physically fit -- and that translates to not only being physically healthier but I also receive the benefits of a better attitude and mental alacrity in all aspects of my life: my sports, my education and my work here at uscity.net.