Playing around with customscreen for banners

The past couple days, I’ve been playing around for the first time with customscreens.

These allow you to generate graphically, information that comes from your weather station and WD and have them
generated into GIF or JPG type format.

We have all seen the default one that comes preset for you called summary.gif that looks like:

My first attempt was to use a basic graphic box with my station logo in it.

My latest attempt is below. This one uses a scenic background from our area to provide more of a area unique look.

Since you can (currently) have up to 10 of these, the possibilities can be almost limitless. All of mine update on the minute.

Very nice -

Myself, I am finally starting to get a handle on how to compose the custom screens - just need to take the time to sit down and do it.

I created an Avatar that has an updating temp on it but found that the current configuration of the SMF forum here doesn’t allow you to reference an avatar offsite automatically. You have to upload a static image instead.

I could use it other places though.

I left that option out when I did the original SMF setup. I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen when trying to display images from a variety of web sites. For example, if your web server is dead and my page references your avatar on your server it would look like there was a problem with the forum, rather than a third party web site.

However, having recently seen how the SMF support forum handles avatars (it only allows remote avatars and not uploaded files) I’ll have a go at running with this option turned on (give me a few minutes to get it enabled before you try it though!)

It works…

Alex has done a great job with this one, uncluttered and with the data nicely integrated with the background image

I have to say that the “Northumberland” banner is about one of the nicest, if not the nicest, I have seen…

Good job,
Bob

Many thanks :oops:
I have to give credit to all the other people on this forum who are experimenting with custom screens. It was from them I got my inspiration. Also I was lucky in finding a picture of my locality that fitted in perfectly with what I wanted to do.
My next task is to come up with an avatar like yours Krelvinaz, I really like your design

Alex

Tonight (er this morning) I have been watching Brians signature which has a custom banner in it.

I was attempting to figure out just how many hours difference there was between him and my timzone.

The thing that kept messing with my head was that the times I was comparing looked wierd…

My time: 12:58AM

His time (on the banner): 20:58 PM

The difference of course is that one is not in 24hour time and the other is, but with a PM stuck on the end.

If I had looked at the time properly it would read…

24 Hour mode
My time: 00:58
His Time: 20:58

12 Hour mode
My time: 12:58AM
His Time: 08:58PM

Which would make the calculation a lot easier

Of course the other reason why I’m having problems with it, is because I have been working too long and need to hit the hay…

Nite…!

i think you will find I am 21 hours ahead of you

From the quoted times it looks like 20 hours (20:58 to 00:58).

Here’s a link to a graphic I added to my site that helps me track what time it is in the world…pretty easy to use :smiley:

http://www.eeph.com/~matthew/world.gif

If I could plug another acquaintance… :wink:

TimeZone Convertor is a site I find myself visiting quite often as I really have a problem wrapping my brain around time zones…

-Bob

  • Who ever came up with the idea of changing times twice a year by an hour ought to be shot… :stuck_out_tongue: -

a new 10.21g up there now…
and now it should have tick marks next to the items set visible when you right mouse click on the custom screen…

Cool… as I watch Brian adjust his custom signature…

Noticed also that the forum puts the signature in a scroll window even when it is not large whcn you make it clickable as a URL, but doesn’t when it is not (like Brians signature which is much taller than mine)… strange.

Mine isn’t clickable but is within table code and there is a text link to my website and the forum sometimes puts my signature in that scroll window - but only sometimes!!

There is a mod for the forums to allow large signature be put into a scroll bar so that if people use really large (tall) singatures, it doesn’t dominate the articles… but it (I believe) shouldn’t be putting scroll bars on by default. My sig with the image is smaller than many but gets scroll bars all the time and that started when I added the URL wrap around it.

Kinda wierd… Chris is still better at the forum stuff than I am in that he had a head start… so maybe he knows.

As it is, it is not actually making my signature look wrong or even bigger with the scroll handles, just strange they are there.

It’s something in the style file that behaves differently between Firefox and IE. I couldn’t find any way to fix this and my style file skills aren’t good enough to try to code in checks for all the possible versions of browsers that might be affected.

The attached is just a mock-up I put together during my lunch break, but any thoughts or recommendations? Will it be possible to do something like this with the WD custom screen tool?

Thanks,
pat----


yes you should be able to do the exact same thing with a custom screen - your title text “The Hartford skyline…” can stay as it is and the other text can be achieved with the custom tags available in the custom screen menu.
And you can have that background image as well.

In fact I thought that was actually your custom screen at first !

:smiley: