Cumulus Support

I know you will probably be bogged down with feature suggestions and I apologise if this subject has been broached before but would you ever consider adding the option of streaming METAR data into Cumulus at any point?

Thinking (selfishly) of my own situation where I wanted to use a weather program and build a website around it but not yet owning a weather station (well technically I do now as I have just got back from Maplins and it is in the box downstairs) it would have been great to be able to set Cumulus to lookup METAR data from airports local to me to get some live data flowing.

Thinking ahead even when I have my own weather station setup it would still be good to check it against local airport METAR data and maybe add a link on my weather webpage to display METAR data in addition to the now, gauges, today, yesterday, records & trends links enabled in the default webpages.

I wouldn't want the program to become bloated beyond belief as the beauty of Cumulus is in its interface and the way in which everything is cleanly laid out but maybe an additional configuration tab labelled METAR would be a nice addition?

Thanks for listening.

Kind regards,
-=Glyn=-

Methinks you are missing the point

... Thinking ahead even when I have my own weather station setup it would still be good to check it against local airport METAR data and maybe add a link on my weather webpage to display METAR data in addition to the now, gauges, today, yesterday, records & trends links enabled in the default webpages.

That is all website design, it is upto to you what you include / exclude on your website, not the 'freebie' example front end of Cumulus.

There are all already many alternative 'web pages', built using either 'web tags', or realtime.txt or more ecletic php / ajax / xml.

Investigate !

It's a valid request, and at least weather-related, unlike some requests I've had in the past, but I'd rather keep Cumulus as an application for reading and presenting data from personal weather stations. And regarding the web, as beteljuice points out, there are better ways of getting that sort of thing onto your web site that don't involve Cumulus.

Steve

You can Manually download and save Metars as text files using MetarWeather (free)
http://www.nirsoft.net/

You would then set up Cumulus to upload this file using the
Configuration
Files option

An automatic system can be used with
Metarsdownloader (free 15day trial)
http://www.metarsdownloader.com/
BUT since the last Microshite Vista update yesterday this software will no longer work at all on my system.

thanks for the helpful suggestion, goldrush. btw...your weather website has a very nice appearance. lex

Thanks for the complement Lex... it is actually based upon the rather excellent Ajax software provided by Beteljuice

First of all, my apologies to GlynH and this forum, on re-reading my response was a little brusque

The beteljuices fingers are much slower than his brain, and sometimes too many shortcuts are made

As I understand it you would like to include external source weather data in your web pages (any particular reason why METAR ?).

There are many sources for this, either as embedded IFrames or widgets or .......

Going the way of METAR, hmm .... unless you are willing to accept someone elses 'banner' or similar:



If as I believe, you would like to 'decode' / format the METAR into something that goes with the flow of your page. It means using some kind of 'server side' script (eg. .pl .php etc.), and then getting your hands dirty to 'fit' it in how and where you want.

eg. http://www.dickie.webfusion.co.uk/compost/wx_TZ.php (This is a lot more flexible than the simple input page suggests, and is in use on many sites around the world BUT again you would need to have some (php) coding experience to truly adapt it to your needs.

So a third party 'plug-in' is your best short term option if you really want to use METAR.

downloaded your wx_TZ script beteljuice

and buggered if i can get it to work

www.gtbastrowise.com.au/wx_TZ.php

geoff

Curious - never had that happen to anyone before.

PHP has been enabled on your server else it wouldn't get as far as it has done.
I've downloaded from the link on my page, unzipped, uploaded to a test area and no problems !

Perhaps either the zip file got corrupted on download or unzip, or perhaps it got corrupted on upload to your server. (Are you uploading it as ASCii ?)

Please try again .... keep me informed

Hmm, i got the same problem: http://www.onooor.yoyo.pl/?pctz=-60
I have php on my server enabled.

Thanks for all the replies & tips guys...even your first post Beteljuice!

No need to apologise BTW as no offence taken...I am old enough, big enough & ugly enough and have been around far too long enough to take it personally...

I might as well learn Swahili as a second language in lieu of html...I thought programs like Front Page were supposed to make things easier?

It struck me when I was looking for weather software and after downloading WD that does handle METAR internally that others could get good use out of Cumulus bearing in mind its clean, uncluttered look & feel and its 'html easy' templates and its internal handling of same without actually buying their own weather station.

Point taken though Steve, you are the developer after all and I certainly wouldn't want it to become bloatware...

I host my websites on my WHS and as such don't have PHP installed - I believe it can be done but the process seemed involved and I would rather my server be stable & reliable than run on a knife edge and become flaky at best.

Thanks & regards,
-=Glyn=-

GTB and simons, you both seem to have the same problem (Which I don't understand at the moment !)

When intially called, the php writes a little bit of JavaScript to ask what the viewers local time difference to GMT is (pctz=+0).

The script is effectively dumped and recalled with the 'posted' pctz value. (It is also possible to post ICAO code, a locality name, and time display preference).

For both of your servers, the 'posted' values are not being detected (although they are being sent), and so it is going into an endless loop of "no pctz detected - call again with pctz".

The script was written for php v4.1 and AFAIK is upwardly compatible and none of the code has been depreciated.

Could it be some kind of security thing with your sites NOT allowing 'posted' variables ? (Unusual but not unknown)

Obviously it must be something sever-side, because you could see my page to download from, but whether it's a permissions thing or PHP set-up, I don't know

Has anyone downloaded it and NOT had any problems please ?

found it

"register globals" in php was "off"

geoff

more problems encountered

now i have variable problems

http://www.gtbastrowise.com.au/wx_TZ.php

geoff

I have no experience of EasyPHP, but it does look like there maybe a few minor discrepances that it's "big brother" is either more tolerant of, or perhaps there's another 'flag'.

I'll check through the code again.

Thanks for the feed-back.