A while back I decided to ditch the old site templates and setup that I used to run the “Olds Alberta Weather Station” site. Reason, my weather station hardware is nearing retirement and the software used for the site only works with that weather station. So rather than reworking the templates and setup for the new location, I’ve dumped it and will start fresh.
I’ve decided to try Cumulus from Sandaysoft as the weather station monitoring software. I had looked at it back in 2007 or 2008, but to move off the FreeWX-Wi was too much work at the time. The big benefit for me now is Cumulus supports multiple weather stations, so I can change to a new weather station (hopefully in the coming months) without having to recode the website. Another big benefit with Cumulus is its nice starter package of web templates. Without much work, the main site is up, a fancy gauge version, and an iPhone site. I’m still missing lots of the data that I use to show, but I can slowly build upon this. With my current time to this project very limited over the last year and foreseeable future, this allows me to share the current weather conditions without a lot of work.
Because I’m not running the web server in my home anymore, the uploads to the main website is not every minute, but every ten minutes. This is due to bandwidth issues with the graphs and html pages. The Silverlight desktop version only uses a small text file, so that file I can upload more often. I’ll probably eventually run it in-house again, but for the meantime, this is easier to support. The likelihood of disconnect between the weather station and the web site is much greater now, so watch the conditions date and time.
Happy weather watching, Jeff
