I’ve found the time to start re-building the main www.weather-watch.com web site. I’m now using MamboServer, although I’m not 100% sure that I’ll keep using this.
I’m in the process of adding weblinks to the site. If you’d like a link to your weather related site on the main site, send me a PM and I’ll get it on as soon as I can. If it fits into a current category, let me know which one. If it’s something different, let me know what you’d suggest as a new category for it. I might not use the suggested category, but if it seems like a useful addition you might see your suggestion available RSN
If you’d like a banner link from weather-watch.com to your weather related site, create a banner image (468*60 GIF or JPG) and email it to [email protected], along with the URL of the site/page that you want to link to. I will be checking each page to make sure it does link to a weather related site. I’m not intending to charge for this service.
There aren’t any user logins to the site at the moment. This is deliberate. Partly to avoid the confusion of people registering for the main site and then being unable to access the forum and partly because I’m hoping to integrate the main site and forum logins in the future. I don’t want two different sets of user accounts to have to merge together.
The site will probably change in the way it looks and features that are/aren’t available over the next few months as I experiment with things.
Hopefully it will be of interest to some people.
Edit: The banner size should have been 468*60 pixels. Sorry for any confusion.
It’s lucky for you that you’re so far away, otherwise I would have had to beat you to death with a wet lettuce for such inflammatory remarks!
are there any large differences between phpbb and [http://www.simplemachines.org/index.php](http://www.simplemachines.org/index.php)? it looks kinda of like [http://www.yabbse.org/yse_history.html](http://www.yabbse.org/yse_history.html)
YabbSE is dead, long live Simplemachines. I don’t know the politics behind the name change, but SMF looks pretty good, seems to offer the things that we use on this forum, is under an active development release cycle and someone is working on a neat integration between Mambo Open Server and SMF…with the SMF dev team being interested in helping make it work.
By contrast phpBB2 offers everything we use on this forum, v2.2 is under active development with no sign of any imminent releases (it’s been under development for what seems like 2 years and all the dev team will say is that it will be released this year…even though it’s not even in beta never mind RC status yet), and whenever anyone mentions integrating with other portals/CMSs there is an almost total lack of interest from the dev team, other than to say that there will be a dedicated phpBB2 portal at some point in the future.
I’ve already done a test migration of user/post data from phpbb to SMF and it works very well. I don’t want to jump to SMF until I know the integration between SMF and MOS is working, reliable and supportable.
extensible markup language
with wd, and the xml ability, you can have just one web page being updated/ftp to your site, and then all the other web pages on your web site can get there data updated from that one pages data using xml, and those pages dont need to be updated/ftp’d (we are talking about text here )
you can even show data from other peoples xml pages too, but you need to set allow data across domains in your browser
the rest of the alphabet soup i know nothing!
:lol:
Since you guys are clearly experts at the alphabet soup stuff, can one of you kindly explain what the heck XML is, and why I would want to use it?
I for one don't know anything about anything. The trick is just to starting naming off smart sounding things until the other person gets bored and leaves.
Seriously, it is nice that WD supports xml because I think (IMHO) that is going to become more and more important to the internet (take that html )
chris, how many banners do you have so far? I spent about 20 reloads, until I thought it would just be easier to ask :lol:
And once again I must say a big thanks for the RSS feed. Gotta love that xml !
Just also wanted to add that MOS certainly looks like a fine CMS platform. I’ll be interested to follow your comments on it. I was looking down the Xaraya path, but this may be even better.
Can I ask your thoughts on ease of setup and administration - and what backend OS you are using?
Just also wanted to add that MOS certainly looks like a fine CMS platform. I'll be interested to follow your comments on it. I was looking down the Xaraya path, but this may be even better.
Can I ask your thoughts on ease of setup and administration - and what backend OS you are using?
I’m running a Fedora Core 1 server, with PHP 4.3.4, MySQL 4.0.16 and Apache 2.0.
Installation only takes a few minutes, although that would depend on how familiar you are with Linux. UnTAR the code into a folder. Create an empty MySQL DB. Run the web based installer (realise you’ve got the folder/file permissions wrong and change them) and it’s more or less there. There’s more set up via the admin pages once you’ve got it up and running, but you can actually play with the real system fairly quickly which is good.
Administration is all via a set of web pages. It’s easy enough to do what’s needed, although it takes a little time to find your way around. I’ve probably spent about 10 hours on setting my site up so far…by far the biggest amount of work is finding and editing content and uploading the images.
There are quite a lot of modules and components (mosforge.net and mamboportal.com have most of them) and as you can see it’s not too difficult to add banners, Amazon WebServices, etc using the available modules/components.
I’ve also been following Xaraya. It’s a fine looking product, but it seems to be taking an age to get to v1.0 and there don’t seem to be masses of themes or modules for it yet. Performance also seems poor in the latest version (my site and xaraya.com). I wanted to get weather-watch.com back on air, so decided to look for an alternative. That’s how I found Mambo and the potential integration with SMF. I’ll keep watching Xaraya and may jump back to it in the future. Perhaps for another of my domains and if it works OK I might put it on Weather-Watch.
Since you guys are clearly experts at the alphabet soup stuff, can one of you kindly explain what the heck XML is, and why I would want to use it?
The real benefits of xml are that it’s non proprietary and that it’s self describing.
This means that it can be used to exchange data between many differnt systems even if they don’t understand the others ‘normal’ language. For example, with the xml output from WD you could import it into any database that understands xml, you could use it to display itself in a web page with only the addition of a style file describing how it should look, or you could use it as an RSS feed. And because it’s ‘self describing’ the other systems don’t care that it’s from WD - it just doesn’t matter.
Another use where it’s important is for web services. For example you might buy an item online from one company but another delivers it to you. When you query your order’s status through the online shop their systems, behind the scenes and invisibly to you, request from the delivery companies systems where your parcel is. It doesn’t matter what systems the parcel delivery company is using because the query is occurring through the use of a web service using an xml data exchange.
As long as the xml feed meets certain standards and requirements it just works. It really is the future of data exchange.
Check out the wXML Project at http://mysite.verizon.net/vze7ij1o/pws.html and see how a bunch of people around the world are sharing data from their personal weather stations just by uploading an XML file to their regular site, regardless of software type. Weather Display has an XML template all ready for use, which is great (I had to hand code all the other ones, which was very time consuming!)
)
I found the “complete idiot’s guide to XML” for less than $5 on Amazon so we shall see…