How’s the Weather Out There?

I’ve been work­ing on mov­ing a bunch of our old fam­ily web­site (Black Dog Farm) to a new server (Black­dog and Mag­pie.) It’s not the pret­ti­est web­site you’ll ever see but it serves well as a sandbox.

At the moment I“m work­ing on build­ing a new set of weather report­ing pages. We have a fairly com­plete set of weather obser­va­tion instru­ments and an old machine in the server cab­i­net that records that data from them. Here at the MCWD I can fire up a pro­gram called Vir­tual Weather Sta­tion and look at many (many) graphs, charts, and reports. The trick now is to get all that lovely data up on the web. (I’ll detail some of the strengths and weak­nesses of VWS in another post.)

In addi­tion to dis­play­ing our total geek­i­ness by hav­ing live weather report­ing on our web­site, we use the reported data to keep track of some of the highs and lows of rural life. Like power line destroy­ing winds and freez­ing temperatures.

Today’s quandary is about what data to put where on which page and how to arrange it.

The main item on the first page is easy. VWS pro­vides a nice sum­mary graphic called “Broad­cast” that is uploaded via ftp.

But what to do with the rest of the space? In par­tic­u­lar what to do with the left col­umn? I’m torn between pro­vid­ing cool stuff for vis­i­tors, like a rotat­ing North­west weather trivia and pro­vid­ing the infor­ma­tion I most need when I’m not at the house.