Castle Rock Weather is experiancing a webcam outage. Webcam images stopped at yesterday around 10:45 PM MDT. The issue appears to be DNS related and we are working with our ISP to resolve the issue. Thank you for your understanding while we work through this technical issue.

Update @ 9:48 AM MDT: ISP changed my IP address, which broke webcam PHP code. Code changed to use DNS URL instead of static IP. DNS records have been updated with new IP address. Looking into new ISP this morning, to avoid repeat.

Another change to the Google application caused our Weather channel map to be unavailable for some time. this morning the map was repaired. Problem boiled down to the “location” variable cannot have a space in it. “Castle Rock” was changed to “CastleRock”. Remember the devil is in the details.

This weekend included a bunch of hardware drama. We are having network issues and sensor issues. It is true, “when it rains it pours!”

We are having problems with our cable modem. It has been dropping our connection nearly daily. Not a big deal if we’re home, but isn’t any fun when we’re at work. Yesterday was the last straw, and this evening we replaced our Linksys Cable Modem with a Motorola Surfboard. From what I’ve read this new modem is more reliable. We like reliable.

While diagnosing our cable modem issue we learned our Linksys firewall was swamped under our traffic loads. Two FTP devices, inbound webservices, uploading to our partners, and running our household internet took it’s toll. We have the little guy patched together the best we can. On order we have a business class Netgear Router/Firewall. Performance is nearly 15 times that of the Linksys. It arrives tomorrow, and should be deployed tomorrow evening.

We missed recording all of the rain that fell this weekend. We had a few good storms roll through, and our consoles, website, and software all read 0.00 in. We did some manual tests with little successs. We contacted Davis support, instead of going to work this morning. They believe our reed switch is faulty. They are shipping us new reed switches. Repairs should be completed early next week.

We appologize for these interuptions to your weather information site. Sometimes things are beyond our control. We are working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible.

esterday we learned more about Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) then we ever truely wanted too. CSS controls the layout and look of our text and images. It powers our navigation menu. It controls our images. It also manages font/fontsize/and color. Sounds important right?

In addition we were managing 2 style sheets. One for the main site, and a second for this BLOG. Small changes made in one were lost from the other. We made changes to the Wordpress files to point to a single shared style sheet. We moved all BLOG spedcifiec tags into the main style sheet. This should help preserve the same look and feel in both environments.

While our site maintains the same basic look and feel we have been battling formating problems for some time. Things that looked great in IE, would breakdown in Firefox/Safari web browsers. We track our visitors and while Internet Explorer is the majority, we have enough visitors using other browsers that this had to be addressed.

Writting a website isn’t like typing up a newletter or magazine. Webpages are viewed by as many as half a dozen different web browsers. Web browsers download the html code I write, and process them in their own unique way. The result is what your looking at. If my code is solid, then everyone sees the same thing. Sometimes my codes works well with one browser, but displays oddly on another. This is something that I’m learning as I continue this project.

Yesterday we resolved the major CSS issues with out site. We continue to strive to provide all our visitors with a simular high quality experiance.  Please feel free to email us your comments anytime.

We spent last weekend and early this week to installing the camera. We still have to tiddy up the CAT5 cable on the outside of the house, but its running. The second half of the week was spent working on delivery and image overlay (adding words over image). Those were 2 very tough problems.

FTP upload is a sore topic around the CRW offices. Our webhost limits the number of connections from our external IP address to 2. They have a package to expand this to unlimited, but it adds an extra $36 per month, and we need to become Linux server admins.

We are using the camera’s built in webserver, and allowing our webserver to connect via http directly and “pull” the image instead of pushing via FTP. The process avoids the FTP upload limits. So the image now is on the webserver, can we see it. We ran 24 hours without image overlays, but our goal is to include weather data directly on the webimage.

We tested ImageSalsa last week. Its a clunky, very complicated piece of software. The software does require a license purchased from Ambient Weather. The way things are going with VWS, we feel uncomfertable investing in that company any longer. ImageSalsa was uninstalled from our servers. Now what?

We have started working more and more with PHP, and figured there had to be something available which could replace ImageSalsa. Image overlaying is a process where you lay text directly over a base image, and create a new resultant image that includes your text. You can also use this to mask the source image, which we are.

Mike, from Long Beach, WA Weather, provided us with an awsome script to do all of that and more. We are currently using his script to transfer base image, resize, overlay text, and a partrige in a pear tree. One script that does it all. We then process our webcam image a second time through a simular script that creates the thumbnail image in the left navigation bar. Pretty slick.

I will update the “our equipment” page to include these two technologies that make our webcam come to life. We have plans to expand the information included on the text overlay. We are also working on scripts that will refresh the webcam image automagically, without refreshing the whole page. Down the road we will be looking for a way to stream video from our camera and provide time laps videos as well.

For now we’re up and running. Off to the next weather related project.

Castlerockweather.Org’s landing page has been upgraded to use dynamic AJAX scripting.

AJAX can be used to update your conditions webpage between regular update times without reloading the entire page in the browser. It does require a ‘modern’ browser, and that JavaScript be enabled in the browser. This script and template set allows you to use a capability of VWS software to frequently update a small pair of data files associated with Weather Flash: wflash.txt and wflash2.txt.

In these files, the current conditions values are set in comma-delimited format. While the format of these files is undocumented by the developers, thanks to the work of Matt at weatherbus.com and Ken at saratoga-weather.org.

The table was reversed engineered from both the WD and VWS AJAX scripts/demos/and templates, which can be found at AJAX Weather-Display with PHP Demo and AJAX VWS / Weather Flash HTML Templates.

We’re not complete, but have done enough to go live with the new design. I hope you find this page more useful then before. Enjoy.

We are now providing Weather Graphics for others to use on their websites. These graphics are sometimes called “Weather Stickers.” Ours are available on our website free of charge. Please check them out at http://www.castlerockweather.org/weathergraphics.php

Here is an example:

I’ve got weather flash loaded on castlerockweather.org, but the demo software does not appear to be working. I’ve also got a small FTP upload issue that I’m trying to solve. WxFlash requires FTP uploads every 5-20 seconds. This ties up my available 2 connections and causes other content to fail. At this point I’ve changed the upload path for the AJAX scripts to work, but at some point I will have to change it back.

We used to use a combination of data.csv and getraw.php. This method worked well, but lacked the ability to update the value, without reloading the whole page. After reading the Seratoga Weather’s AJAX script pages, decoding the scripts and templates, and some playing around with test pages, we were able to upgrade our site with the new content.

I wanted to thank Seratoga Weather again for their contributions to the personal weather station website community. For more information about using AJAX scripts with VWS please check out the following link: http://saratoga-weather.org/scripts-VWS-AJAX.php#VWSajaxwf

Virtual Weather Station today recorded its 365 day of data.