Cumulus Support

My weather station is permanently connected to an ASUS netbook computer with a 7in screen and a 900 MHz processor. This combination works well unless I wish to view any stats that are only available on the netbook ie This Month and This Year.

I was thinking that I would like to add these two sets of information to the standard Cumulus website as separate webpages and be available via the navigation bar. On each page there would be a dropdown box so that you could select a particular month or year.

I have used Frontpage in the past to produce a couple websites for friends ie http://www.firtreecottage.co.uk but never used FTP because I always chose a web host with Frontpage Extensions. Can anybody advise me how or where to start?

scramblers wrote:....I have used Frontpage in the past to produce a couple websites for friends ie http://www.firtreecottage.co.uk but never used FTP because I always chose a web host with Frontpage Extensions.

Time to upgrade your skills

You will find a dwindling number of webhosts supporting the FP extension -- FP has been all but dead since 2006

Can anybody advise me how or where to start?

I think the best thing would be to start with a copy of an existing page. Take a copy of todayT.htm in the Cumulus\Web folder, call this thismonthT.htm

Now open it is a good text editor (Google Notepad++ it's free)

The html code might look a little daunting to start with but hang on in there. You should see phrases jumping out at you and also Webtags (http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Webtags) so you can start to replace these with the Monthly ones.

(Note, the Monthly and year tags are only available in the Beta version of Cumulus so I assume you are using a beta?)

Once you are comfortable with the file we can explain how to get Cumulus to replace all those tags with real data and get it to upload to your site. Then we can modify the navigation menu

On each page there would be a dropdown box so that you could select a particular month or year

Not so easy -- You would need to store all the monthly & yearly data in a database, or a file, on your webserver so that the user can interact with the page and it can then get the data it needs. You could manually create a page for each month & year buy this is annoying to maintain.

Let's start with baby steps!

Hi David,

Thank you for quickly getting back to me and offering your assistance.

I've downloaded a copy of Notepad++.

At present I'm using Cumulus v1.9.0 do I just download and run the latest beta software on the ASUS netbook?

Hi John,

I added a page for this month and year to my website. My HTML skills are pretty basic but it wasn't too difficult. If you don't need to add any extra columns in the table it should just be a case of replacing the webtags and changing the titles.

You will need to upload the Template version of this new page using the Cumulus interface. I named mine thismonthyearT.html.

Good luck!

Go the whole hog and utilise the new beta webtags. I've modified the recordT.html page to display today, yesterday, this month, this year and all time records on one page. Saved uploading three pages.

Hi Captzero/Ray,

I'm trying to understand a little more on how to do this. My web/programming skills are zero, is there a template file you can provide to assist or else point me in the direction of where on the wiki to look for a "how-to" to create my own?

Cheers

Hi Bigmac,

I'm no expert but the concept of adding new information to your web pages is done through webtags. Have a look here. http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Webtags

If you want a new page with records for This Month & This Year there are specific webtags in that link that you place on a new HTML document. Mine is named ThisMonthYearT.html. Note the T to denote it's a template that Cumulus converts to a standard html page but containing the actual values. Have a read here. http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Customised_templates

You also need to upload cumuluswebtags.txt in Internet / Files so Cumulus has access to all the tags and the data they contain. See attached picture.

That's a start. Come back if you need more info.

RayProudfoot wrote:You also need to upload cumuluswebtags.txt in Internet / Files so Cumulus has access to all the tags and the data they contain.

Cumulus doesn't need this, and it's not needed for HTML pages. You only need to upload this if you have PHP web pages which need somewhere to read the data from.

steve wrote:

RayProudfoot wrote:You also need to upload cumuluswebtags.txt in Internet / Files so Cumulus has access to all the tags and the data they contain.

Cumulus doesn't need this, and it's not needed for HTML pages. You only need to upload this if you have PHP web pages which need somewhere to read the data from.

Thanks Steve. I will have uploaded that for my PHP generated banner below. So you can ignore that bit Bigmac.

Thanks Ray (& Steve).
So, if I've understood correctly, for my first row of data of highest temps for the year and the month, my html page would look like this:

<tr class="td_temperature_data">
<td class="main_table_text_labels">Highest&nbsp;Temperature</td>
<td class="right_align_indented"><#YearTempH>&nbsp;<#tempunit></td>
<td class="right_align_indented"><#YearTempHT>&nbsp;<#YearTempHD></td>
<td class="right_align_indented"><#MonthTempH>&nbsp;<#tempunit></td>
<td class="right_align_indented"><#MonthTempHT>&nbsp;<#MonthTempHD></td>
</tr>

Do I also have to change the colspan number to equal 5 as I'm adding two more columns for the year data and the time & date data?

I'm no expert but comparing yours to mine I think you need a colspan="5" on the row containing Highest Temperature so it spans all 5 columns.

If you go to my website and choose "This Month/Year", right-click and choose View Page Source you can see how mine was constructed. It will include the data rather than webtags but in all other respects it's the same as the raw document.

Mine will differ to yours as I keep temperature, time and date all in a single column.

I've created a 'this month' and a 'this year' page based on the existing all-time records page:

http://sanday.org.uk/weather/thismonth.htm
http://sanday.org.uk/weather/thisyear.htm

Note that I haven't modified the navigation section, and there may be the odd error here and there (e.g. wrong web tag used). Templates attached.

Many thanks for that
Even for me, a web design dummy, it was straightforward to implement them in my records page.

Ah genius! Thanks to all.
As I said, my web skills were zero so I didn't know I could view the source of a webpage like that (thanks Ray!).
I think between you all, you have given me enough information to workout what I need to do, so looks like I have a project on this weekend!
I'll let you know how I get on.

steve wrote:I've created a 'this month' and a 'this year' page based on the existing all-time records page:

http://sanday.org.uk/weather/thismonth.htm
http://sanday.org.uk/weather/thisyear.htm

Note that I haven't modified the navigation section, and there may be the odd error here and there (e.g. wrong web tag used). Templates attached.

bigmac wrote:Ah genius! Thanks to all.
As I said, my web skills were zero so I didn't know I could view the source of a webpage like that (thanks Ray!).
I think between you all, you have given me enough information to workout what I need to do, so looks like I have a project on this weekend!
I'll let you know how I get on.

I have downloaded the .zip and extracted in the /cumulus/web folder. Not sure what next to do. Does Cumuluss process these thismonthT and thisyearT with each web update? I have looked in my website /weather folder for the thismonth.htm and thisyear.htm but don't see them. Do I need to add them to the /Cumulus Internet settings 'Include standard files'?

Paul