|
A Peek Behind The Weather Station Curtain From time to time folks have asked about the station and so this is a peek behind the curtain to tell a bit more about the weather station. It came online in January of '07 while still in TX in anticipation of our move here. It took until Oct to finally get everything settled out in TX and moved here and readings in MX began on Oct 11th, 2007. There are 4 "pages" on the site, the Main page, the Webcam page, the LCS page and a Daily page with several others used for testing purposes. Each page is made up of Tables and Cells within the Tables to properly position the graphics you see. The main pages are updated and uploaded to the host server every 15 minutes (or more often if severe weather is present). Each upload consists of 46 jpg images and 3 main htm pages. The webcam uploads an image at 1 minute intervals. When you click on a page a "request" is made to the host server and the page and it's associated images are downloaded to your browser. A single "click" by a user creates a request for roughly 50+ items on the Main page. As an example on July 20th there were 5,741 Page Requests resulting in 182,660 item requests, or an average of 32 items per request. This is because when the Webcam page is requested only 5 items are downloaded lowering the overall average. Stats from the host server date to Dec 2007, there have been 64,583,038 successful requests with 3,221,081 Page requests and 25,408 Page requests in the last 7 days. Our daily page averages run around 3,000 to 3,500 with less in the dry seasons, more during unusual activity. The program used to create the pages is MS FrontPage, an outdated program, but still functional. However, forcing it to properly space everything is a challenge. To that end the Main page has 186 Tables/Cells, the LCS page has 85 Tables/Cells. The metric conversions are accomplished by Javascripts as is the day and date at the top. Most all the daily statistics are recreated during each 15 min update cycle from the internal files. The complexity (heartburn) comes in structuring the Tables/Cells to properly display the page and it has to happen on Firefox, Internet Explorer and Mac browsers i.e., Safari and each browser displays slightly different, so any changes may look great in one, but terrible in another. Also FrontPage has a nasty habit of being a "sponge" and expanding in my setup mode yet shrinking to the desired size in your browser. At times in my setup mode adding a picture causes tables to expand, but not retract when the image is removed requiring a lot of clicking and cussing to get it back to proper size. Operationally the majority of the
graphics are automated, manually I change: As mentioned recently on a forum, the overall folder that is "ChapalaWeather" on the weather PC is 6,000 files consisting of images, executable programs and data files. Many files are updated daily while several new files are added each day to document overall conditions. The main database is currently 19, 301 lines long growing at 96 lines per day (once ever 15 min) and is 67 columns wide. When the CFE drops power etc. this is the primary file needing to be updated from a battery powered data logger. If there is a problem with rain amounts that becomes extremely complex involving at least 5 interactive files, it's "jello", you push one one file and it causes a change in another. That's a brief peek behind the curtain of what ChapalaWeather.net is all about.
|
