The History

Before February 1998, the website was only maintained by one guy called Stanley Shiu instead of the whole team. He is now the webmaster of this site.

It is a long history before the establishment of this site. This plan came into Stanley's mind in late 1994 when the use of the Internet was getting popular.

Before Establishment

At first, Stanley had only limited amount of materials. Therefore, he had been trying his best to look for various resources in these years. Data found were typed into his personal computer.

Since he was engaged in secondary studies and public examinations, he had little time to organize those data and learn how to build up a website on the Internet.

Stanley finally learnt the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which was used in his homepage design, in summer 1997. With the provision of an Internet account by his university, he tried to write his personal homepage which contained a weather column. His homepage was put online on 30th August 1997. And later he named it as Stanley's Weather Wonderland in September.

After Establishment

More stuff like self weather observations was added to the site since then. In late October, the site was renamed as Weather Wonderland of Hong Kong and greatly advertised in many newsgroups, forums and search engines.

From November 1997 to March 1998, the website had been re-organized again and again so as to make the site more professional in appearance and reduce the downloading time of the site.

Team Working

It is really hard for only one person to maintain a website. Stanley had to find assistance. In February 1998, two of us, Ah-Lok and Mr. J, had been persuaded and invited to work together with Stanley.

Stanley had been trying to make the site funny and interesting. Having just learnt to write CGI programs and some network utility tools, Stanley introduced the Weather Substation Director Scheme in January 1998 and he had written many programs for this. But unfortunately, the scheme didn't attract many weather fans to participate. So it was removed in May.

In fact, Stanley, Ah-Lok and Mr. J was working for the automated weather system from January till February. The system started eventually in late March 1998. It provides latest local weather and aviation weather. Even in late June, the tropical cyclone warning centre was established with automated service on tropical cyclone warning bulletins maintained by this system.

After the discard of the Weather Substation Director Scheme, the three held the Meteorology Competition which let weather fans to learn meteorology in an interactive way. Happy to say, we find that the competition has good impression.

More and more people have joined to voluntarily work for this site since June 1998. Up to now, there are totally 7 staff members. 2 of them, Mr. J and Amy, work under the part time basis. The two will help the team whenever we ask. The rest (Stanley, Uncle Thunderstorm, "Hate Cold" Ghost, Miss X and Ah-Lok) are full-time. We share the jobs among ourselves and work in terms.

Owing to the increase in the size of the working staff, many innovative services can be introduced. The Learning Zone and the News Digest were online in late July and December respectively. The former is a place for learning more about weather and meteorology through self-study teaching materials provided there. The materials were all written by us. The latter stores many invaluable news articles related to weather in Hong Kong in past years.

Apart from these, our online magazine, The World of Weather Fans, was published in early June 1999. It is the continuation of the Wee Wun Wun Notepad.

Year 2000 Project

In March 1999, we planned a project of creating a new face for the site. Then all of us were busy working for different parts of the project. The year 2000 website was open on 28 June 1999 (Monday). And the project was completely finished in late 1999.

First Gathering

For celebrating the year 2000, we organized an outdoor gathering for weather fans. This was the first gathering and the first time we had co-operation with another weather site to hold a joint function. The experience gained from this gathering would be valuable for us. We promised that we could have better arrangement and preparation for future activities.

Executive Committee Establishment

Weather Wonderland will have new plans for affair extension. Owing to this news, during early 2000, the current team, having 7 people in total, felt that the workload would be very heavy and more manpower would be required. As a result, another team called Executive Committee was formed on 15 April 2000 (Saturday). For those 7 people who were currently working, they would be assigned to another new team called Website Support Team.

There are totally 9 people in the Executive Committee. They are Stanley Shiu, Fat Pooh, Zingkan, Sunny, Alvin Lam, Chase-wind Boy (Roger), John Yeung, Summer and Sammy. Among them, Stanley is the chairperson. For those above-mentioned committee members, they are in fact very talent. Zingkan, Sunny, Chase-wind Boy (Roger), John Yeung, Summer and Sammy are weather enthusiasts. Fat Pooh is good at language writing while Alvin Lam is a marketing person.

Our Future

Let us briefly tell you about our future plans. One of which is the registration of legalizing Weather Wonderland to be a formal society. Being a legalized society, we can organize activities in a greater extent and with much ease. At the moment, we are waiting for completion of registration from the Government.

Apart from this plan, we will apply for our website's domain name with org (organization) as the domain class. This will be a luxury to us because we can have our unique website and definitely our wonderland.

Weather Wonderland being a registered society

Since the establishment of the executive committee, we had asked the Government to register ourselves to be a formal society. The preparation and application for society registration lasted for over a month. On 18 May 2000 (Thursday), we were happy to be notified by the Government that the registration was successfully done on 8 May 2000 (Monday).

Our society has the following objectives:

(1) Organizing activities like group discussion, workshop and gathering for people who are interested in meteorology (i.e. weather).
(2) Providing weather information and meteorological knowledge through the Internet.

Being a registered society, we can organize activities in a greater extent and with much ease. We promise to organize an gathering for weather fans in the latter part of this year.

This is just a part of our "new plans". Other than this, we will help our website to apply for a domain name with org (organization) as the domain class.

We have our domain name

On 27 May 2000 (Saturday), we asked the Hong Kong Network Information Centre for registration of our domain name, weatherland.org.hk. We were notified on 29 May 2000 (Monday) that the registration process was successfully completed. We now have our domain name and our web address gets shorter.

What we plan to do is for your advantage as you are a member of our family, Weather Wonderland. Our future depends on the success of those plans. Those plans are our dreams, and probably your dreams. Let us sit together and be ready to watch our dreams to be coming true.

Joint Gathering

8 October 2002 is a big day to us. On that day, a joint gathering was organized by totally 6 big weather websites, including Weather Wonderland of Hong Kong, Weather Underground of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Weather Information Centre and Typhoon 2000.

The gathering consisted of two sessions. One was the daytime BBQ party, and the other was Chinese cuisine dinner. Both were held in Tsuen Wan.

We could expect that there would be quite a number of weather friends to participate. Hence everything had to be well-prepared and all our timetable slots were fully occupied.

During the BBQ party, there were many discussion topics, ranging from weather to non-weather areas. Laughs and happiness could be easily observed from each participant.

For the dinner, we had a number of games. Since the age among participants varied much (with the youngest aged twelve and the eldest of age 40), those games were tailor-made to suit everyone, while the enthusiasm would not degrade. We were much enjoyed that night.

Here, we would like to thank for those who participated and those who assisted in organizing this activity. We hope that such similar joint activity can be held again in future.

Online Radio Station - Meteorology Channel

This is a breakthrough to us. Our online radio station, Meteorology Channel (abbreviated to M-Channel), which is co-operated by various websites, including Weather Wonderland of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Weather Information Centre, Typhoon 2000 and Hong Kong Meteorology Centre, started broadcasting on 3 March 2002.

The radio station is limited to Cantonese at the current stage. And it can be found in Chinese version of the website.

Stepping into 5th Anniversary

Year 2003 will be our 5th anniversary. Stepping into the fifth year, we will organize a series of activities for celebration. Please stay tuned to the website for latest announcement.

Besides, we have a slogan, "Strive for the best". Let us join hands and try hard to make achievement. And this goal is also demonstrated in our new cartoon logo shown in the front page.

Celebrating Activity 1: Lucky Draw

On 12 October 2002, there was a BBQ gathering hosted by Hong Kong Weather Information Centre. We were invited to sponsor for the lucky draw section. During the lucky draw, many gifts were sent out. And this gathering served a marvellous opportunity to announce our coming 5th anniversary.