The saga of
Kiss Weather
Kiss Me Weather
Kissimmee Weather
and finally,
(West) Kissimmee Weather
I just wanted...
... a weather station to help with availability of real data for my own use. Then I wanted a web site just for me as a centralized tool. Then I realized others might benefit from the same data, especially the many visitors to our area courtesy of The Mouse. All of that, from ordering the equipment to going live with a web site, occurred in less than a month’s time. My head was still spinning and the savings account would take a while to recover, but I don’t regret a minute of it.
Station equipment, a Davis Vantage Pro Plus, was ordered in mid-August of 2009 and received a week later. During that week I decided on how and where I would mount the sensors upon arrival. Given the space and structures, after reading a lot of guidance, I decided on the best location and that a mast about 15 feet high would be appropriate. The story, with photos, of how the present mast came about and progressed is The Mast Project in Adobe pdf format.
It took me 1 day of WeatherLink to know I wanted more and 1 day of the trial version of Weather Display to know that it was the package I wanted. I had read the descriptions and specs of a couple of others but was leaning toward Weather Display from early-on.
I have not been disappointed.
My experience with Weather Display was probably similar to that of most. It was a daunting package with so many options, settings, tweaks, ticks, and tocks I just knew I'd screw it up.
And I did.
Several times.
But that wasn't all bad because in trying to figure out what I'd screwed up I learned the screens and the package. I also learned a few things about the weather.
Understand I am not a weather buff, fan, nut, or whatever describes someone who has a keen interest in the weather. I must admit I've always wanted a job I could keep where I could be wrong half the time, but my real interest is primarily in hurricane tracking. My purpose is purely functional.
I do so because I was raised in New Orleans and still have family there and elsewhere in the state of Louisiana, and because where I live now, the Orlando area, is not exactly hurricane-immune either. I know the damage hurricanes and tropical storms can do and I pay attention to them, giving myself and others as much advance warning as possible. I track for my own use (3 hurricanes directly over the roof here in 2004) and for my family back in Louisiana.
My introduction to Weather Display was also an introduction to some new concepts (for me) and a reintroduction to others, in addition to a hello to the software package. (I'm still not sure why I should care about wind run, by the way. I've lived over 6 decades not knowing such a thing existed or that anyone quantified it, but there it is, so someone must care. I am so far not among the group.)
It also had me doing some unit conversions, not because I needed to, but because it brought up some old tasks of years gone by and I played with some of them a bit. Weather Display patiently waited while I played, sitting there with the options already checked for my most likely settings.
Though I sing high praise of Weather Display I cannot do so regarding its documentation. Considering all the platforms and manufacturers' equipment with which it is compatible, however, my bet is that if there were highly detailed and comprehensive manuals for each and every flavor, well, the software's development would slow to a crawl and its cost would necessarily increase. I will not be one complaining, therefore, about the lack of detailed instructions.
I consider the instructions for Weather Display adequate for their purpose, knowing that there is a tremendous amount of information available on-line. And it's not "just there for the asking." The fact is, you don't have to ask. It's there is historic volumes of past discussion threads, and then, if need be, it is there if you need to ask. The world of personal weather station owners is alive, well, and in a sharing mood; it provides ongoing support. And judging by the numbers, a large portion of that world has been a new user of Weather Display at one time or another.
So it was with trial and error, using the manual, reading forums and searching when I had a problem, that I managed to get by graphs that didn't update, data that went to the wrong place, data that disappeared, and various other screw-ups that hurt nothing and had no affect on my station's ability to present real time data. I'm not so sure a totally smooth installation and configuration would have been as beneficial in the long run.
Then I added fuel to the fire.
Still breaking and fixing Weather Display, I bought Weather Display Live. I didn't know if I was going to do that or not when I began, and still didn't know why I was doing so when I bought it. It was just one of those "It seemed like a good idea at the time" things. I admit that I now probably could have done without it, but it's such a nice touch and almost fun to play with, I consider it a reward for all the work I invested in learning the base product. Yes, that's rationalization at work, but I still don't regret buying it.
The web site: If I can, just about anyone can.
Have a weather web site, that is. There's a lot of help out there and there are a lot of things to try. And I don't know of any of them that will smoke your computer. Then again, I could be wrong about that, but I have had some really strange, sometimes weirdly entertaining displays on my screen and there's been no permanent damage yet.
Yes, it takes money to buy weather station equipment. It also takes money to buy software to run it on your PC. I can't do much about that for you. But if you've passed those hurdles and have space someplace for a web page, and that space meets some pretty standard requirements for server software support, well, the odds are high that if you want a weather web site, you can have one.
Pardon me while I plagiarize part of a letter I sent to three generous gentlemen who have made this site possible (is it plagiarizing if you copy work you've already written?), and who will probably be participants in your success in doing the same.
I turned this site live sometime around oh-dark-thirty on September 5, 2009, less than a month after ordering my weather station. As stated earlier, I didn’t originally intend to. I intended only an equipment/informational tool for myself, but a web site went on-line doing that and more, less than a month later. That strikes me as an impressive statement of how easily a weather web site can be built. And, no credit to me because I didn't really do it, but I think it's a decent looking one that presents tons of information to me and to whoever else wants to view it. If all that occurred in less than a month and I didn't want it, what if I had wanted it?!
Being an old fart (my first computer was a TRS “Trash”-80 in the 70’s with a 3-digit serial number, 2K of memory, and an audio recorder for data storage and transfer; I learned BASIC by entering lines from a magazine and troubleshooting to figure out the errors before next month’s issue; the Internet didn’t exist - I ran a bulletin board when stationed in Riverside CA and we met on Saturdays at Denny’s to swap software to post for users; I enjoyed buying that modem that made the lightning speed-leap from 1200 baud to 3600 baud (but I began at 300 baud); I was around when the term “shareware” was coined, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,…) I know it was neither IBM nor Micro$oft who brought computing to the home folks. And it definitely wasn't Commodore, TI, or Apple, either.
In the meantime I’ve forgotten almost everything I knew and the high tech world has left me in the dust via its geometric progression. At one time I knew pretty much everything there was to know about “computing” and now there is so much to know I know virtually nothing. Today, I couldn’t program putting “Hello, Bob” on the screen in BASIC, or any other language, if I had to.
“Back in the old days,” it was guys like Ken True, Mike Challis, and Kevin Reed, and others, writing software for the enjoyment of it. And they shared what they wrote, forming the broad base of an ever growing user community. Sometimes we users would buy lunch, or send diskettes, or maybe a few bucks. We learned to share both the use and the buck, if the buck only in amounts of token appreciation. That’s what the few bucks were -- tokens. And as the shareware concept grew, authors began to realize the great numbers of lives they had touched. Many users also began to realize that much of what was dear to them on their computers had come from giving individuals who wrote and shared.
Things are different today in that we now have PayPal, which we didn't then, yet those three guys and many others still don't even package their efforts as shareware. It's easier for them to collect money but they still don't demand it by cripping their products. No time limits, no missing features, you're running the real and whole thing.
And coming full circle, here I was again, wanting to build a weather web site and having precious few skills to do so.
Then I realized that much of what I'd been reading on the forums hadn't been limited to my station equipment, nor had it been limited to Weather Display. No, going back and looking again there was a lot out there on building your own web site. And the more I read the more I realized it was all there right in front of me -- a complete web site already put together. In fact, more than one, I had a choice beyond what Weather Display would do, in itself not a bad option, either.
I downloaded a couple of packages, browsed a lot of folks' web sites with a critical eye, and decided which package I wanted. I then printed out the web pages of instructions, stapled them together, and spent a night reading.
Now, I can follow most instructions up to a point and I began to customize the scripts provided for building a web page. I filled in and changed as instructed. It took a few tries and I had some, uh, well, interesting but unintended screen displays along the way, but in the end it all worked. It took 2 of 3 sons and a lot of phone calls to set up my blog, and I still have trouble maintaining it, but it took no phone calls to set up my weather site. Says something about those scripts, doesn't it?
Then I began using the scripts as I had many years ago used those magazines, looking for an example of how they did what I might want to do. Trial and error, or maybe more like search and destroy, it took me over an hour to get simple bullets and indentation on the ”Disney Visitor?” page. But it got done.
As Clint said, a man's got to know his limitations and I probably won’t get much further than that kind of basic formatting of text and adding links here or there, but what I see when I look at my site is light years ahead of anything I could have imagined doing. I would have been the monkey trying to write Shakespeare -- possible, but not in my lifetime.
Yes, there are scripts that I download, read, and wonder when/if I'll ever be able to use them due to what they require (building a SQL database is not on this side of the moat at the moment), and I’ve got more cleanup to do, commenting out features I probably won’t use in the future, moving some text around (no way I'm moving windows, frames, or tables!) and then it will be back to making more of a Weather Central for myself.
As I write this I await the delivery of a small connector. I've got a drawer full of RJ11 and RJ45 connectors, but I never knew an RJ12 was different from an RJ11, so my small, inexpensive lightning detector from Hobby Boards.com sits on the desk because that RJ11 won't work in the USB adapter. I also await inclusion of the MesoMap Live feature as soon as I figure out a way to pay for it without using Pay Pal (long story, but I avoid using their "service" now) and I get that same impending jaws of doom feeling as when I first opened Weather Display.
And then the web-cam will come off the top of the monitor and see what its like outdoors in a weatherproof box. It may take up permanent residence out there -- we'll see.
The bottom line...
...is that this site is the product not so much of my doing, but that of others who have shared their wealth of knowledge and effort.
And that means, you can probably have a weather web site, too, if you want one.
Thank you, Ken, Mike, Kevin, and all you others writing and sharing the scripts that make the weather web site world turn.
Bob -- September 8, 2009