You might have seen some testing that @BeaumarisWX has been doing to automate posting of updates to the forum when WxSim GFS data is missing/late. The forum has a secure API which allows automated posts to be made, as well as a lot of other things that aren’t really useful to most users, e.g. management functions like creating users, etc.
I was thinking of other ways the API could be used and one thing that sprung to mind was for software/websites to post a message when a new all time record was set for your station. I was thinking that for something like PWS Dashboard there could be a daily cron job run that checked to see if any new records had been set since the last run and if so then post a short message to a specially created ‘records’ forum category saying what record had been set along with a link to the site. This would add some interest to the forum and also allow you to publicize your sites a little more.
If anyone is interested in coding something like this then I can help with information about how the API can be used to post a message and provide an API key to let your script work. I did take a quick look at PWS Dashboard and thought that a cron job should be fairly easy to create starting from a copy of parts of history_popup.php. That script has the framework to extract the record data with dates, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to add some checks and then post a message if any had occurred since the last cron job run. I’m sure that other software/templates already have the data available so it would be possible to do the same with them.
If you can think of any other ways to use the API to generate weather content from stations/web sites then I’d be interested to discuss them too.