Meteotemplate - new free website template

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1

Hey guys,

I am sorry it took so long (but at least I passed my entrance exams, which at that time was more important to me), but I guess I can finally say after months of nights spent coding that my template is ready :slight_smile:

First I would like to thank all those that helped me not just by testing and reporting bugs, but also supporting me and ensuring me what I was doing could be useful (see the Credits page, most of all I would like to thank Tony, Tom, Carl, Paul, Marc, Ken and Brian).

So here is a quick summary of what exactly I am talking about and some important things to note:

I introduce to you my alternative template which I called simply Meteotemplate. It is an interactive website template, where there is many already present pages with weather forecasts, climate, astronomy related pages, maps etc., as well as an entire section for your own PWS with many interactive tables, graphs and basically infinite options of what you can do and display.

And now several important things to keep in mind:

[list]
[li]one of the biggest advantages of this template is that it uses its own database, which means you have much more options with regards to what you can calculate and you can basically make a script for any statistic and make any graph you like. [/li]
[li]however, one of the disadvantages of this approach is that you obviously have to create the database. I tried to make it as simple as possible by writing scripts which can automatically import your history logs so that you don’t have to start with a blank database, then there are scripts for updating the database at regular intervals.[/li]
[li]it is probably more likely than unlikely that you will have some sort of problems that might take you a while to solve, but the good news is that I will offer as much support as possible and so far, even though most of my testers also had problems at times, we were able to get it working in the end in all cases! Also, keep in mind that once you have your database ready, the actual template requires close to no need of any set up and works

2

Very impressive! Well done.

I look forward to trying it out, probably tomorrow.

3

Very nicely made,bo doubt about that…and of course i have it running on my website and adapted it.Some will start a brand new site from the template and others will “dismantle” it to only keep the Weather Station part (as i did) :roll: …

Last time i had a conversation with this guy,i was pissed off and stubburn cuz it wasnt working well for me aaaaaaand i apologized…Jachym put a lot of hours in this template to achieve whats presented here but like a lot of people here,im no script guru.and got a bit discouraged.Yesterday when it was released ,i re dloaded it and started working on it again and fit it to my website.And as a WD user,if some is having trouble,of course ill try to help :wink:

Now heres the thing…ive imported all my logs from January 2015…everything looks ok EXCEPT the MAX wind data…i had a lot of gusts over 50 kmh but they are not appearing on theWD log files and dunno why…

An idea about that Brian ?

4

Hi Carl,

first of all, thanks for your comments, I really appreciate it. And I was not pissed off, I sort of understood your frustration when it wasnt doing what it was supposed to do, but the problem was that if you say you want to be a tester, then obviously you do have to expect there will be bugs and also people sometimes assume things rather than read properly the documentation. Either way, I am really glad for what you did and I hope it will now be working like a charm.

With regards to your questoin about wind gusts, I am in contact with Brian about this, he just sent me an email yesterday and I now replied, so dont worry, this is also being solved.

5

Dammit…im peeing everywhere… :shocked!: hehehe

6

Little question about color chooser…we see the color table from light to dark,(left to right)…when we click on set,only the dark color is chosen( far right)…How do we select the lighter color on the left ?..Is it possible ?

thanks :wink:

7

Aha I see,
well basically, you can choose from several color themes. Each color theme is represented by one row. The entire template is always a combination of 2 themes (but you can set both to one color and then you sort of get just one colored theme).
Then, each of those themes, for example “dark red” has predefined shades for various things and it uses these for coloring the template. In other words, when you choose “dark red” you are not choosing one particular color, all the colors in that row are used at various places in the template (to match font color etc.).So you cant really choose just one particular color, but you choose the theme - represented by the row - and the row shows you all the color shades, this particular theme uses.

I hope it makes sense :smiley:

8

Ahhh i see…my taughts were that we were able to select the lighter color for the main color as well. Its alright thanks :wink:

9

Brian

…heres an image of the problem i have with my logfile and winds data…in the yellow boxes you see the wind gust on the main window and on the right,in the log file viewer :wink:

thanks for taking a look

log.jpg
log.jpg1313Ă—606 332 KB

10

ahhhhhhhhhhhh i think i know whats happening…isnt the winds speed in knots in the log files ???

11

Thats it Jachym…found it…in the config file,the units for the wind IN THE DATABASE are in kmh and we have to change this for kt

$dataWindUnits = “kt”; // ms, kmh, kt or mph

:smiley:

12

yes, its knots, in the WD logfile, if metric logfile in use
(because I just happend to like knots when WD was first created)
and mph if USA logfile in use

13

But now,i see something weird on my page…today’s max gust is at 43 kmh…and its only 27.8 kmh on WD hehehhhe

Today av.12.54 kmh Max 43.2 kmh Min 0.0 kmh

But,other days and rest of the year looks ok…

14

Hi,

no I dont think that is the problem, I knew that clientraw.txt units cannot be modified by the user so the script is written with fixed units for this one and converts them if necessary before saving to DB.

So for example, if you set your db units to kmh, then the script still takes the clientraw value as knots, but before saving, converts to kmh. If you set knots in your config.php, then it simply takes the value from clientraw. Same with temperature (in clientraw always deg C) etc.

15

so what should i do now ???..im a bit confuse…cuz as i said,all other moths look normal (above 40 kmh remember ?)…only today that is offset

16

If the value in your WD logs does not correspond to the WD value on the other screen then this is purely some issue with WD, not the template and so I cant really help you with this.

With regards to logging the data, I already deal with this with Brian. I think the problem is as follows (best explained using an example):

Imagine your station measures gust etc. at 10s intervals. All this data is transferred to WD, written into clientraw and sent to the server. If for example this gust just happens to be the daily max, it is also saved into the daily max gust parameter of WD.

Now, imagine your CRON is set to 1 minute intervals. This means that your CRON takes your clientraw values at eg. 5:55, 5:56, 5:57… But, your clientraw is reuploaded at 5:55:00, 5:55:15, 5:55:30 etc. So, if for example the max gust occurs at 5:55:20, then this would be reflected in the clientraw uploaded at 5:55:30, but, at 5:55:45 new clientraw would be uploaded and this one would not contain it (unless it occurred again in the last 15 seconds). And so in this case, the max gust would be saved as “daily max gust” in WD, but not reflected in the logs and also in the database.

This is actually I think a global problem, not related just to my template. The problem is that the highest gust in this case would only be saved for a certain time, it would be in the daily max gust parameter of WD, then maybe weekly max gust, annual… etc. but over time it could be overwritten by new maximum and if it is not in the logs, it would be lost forever.

On the other hand, this is probably an issue just with the wind, because none of the other parameters change so quickly. Temperature, humidity, pressure… none of these really change substantially in 15 seconds. And precipitaiton is also not an issue since that is cumulative value so you simply take the latest value.

I suggested to Brian that this could be solved if there was a possibility where the user could choose some interval and WD returned max/min/avg for that past interval. Ie. for example I would set 1 minute and WD would have a parameter which would then return max, min (and possibly avg) value from that last 1 minute. Or I could choose 2 minutes etc. (and in case of my template you would choose the interval at which yuo run your CRON job). And I would then suggest that these values would also be used for the logs, so that you never lose any maximum/minimum values.

However, I am not sure how difficult it would be to implement and I know that Brian must be really busy so I cannot tell how realistic it is to have. Meteobridge for example can do this, I have my db updated every 5 minutes so I log for example the max gust in latest 5 minutes and never lose any data.

Theoretically you could use some of the already existing tags like “max gust last 10 minutes”, but that would mean that you would have that maximum there, but you would have it there for 10 consecutive records even though it only occurred once.

17

ive change the clientraw settings to from 5 seconds to 60 seconds…lets se what happend tomorrow

18

@Brian…

the wind units are in Knots in the logfiles…

are the wind units in knots in the clientraw file ?

19

Wind in clientraw files is always in knots, doesn’t matter what log units you are using.

20

ok thanks niko…just wanted to be sure :wink: