July 2005 to January 2008

 The weather station is working wonderfully. A couple of issues arose in the siting of the temperature sensors - they do not like to be in the sun!

The indoor sensor is kept in the conservatory, as this is north facing, moving the sensor out of full sun was not a major problem, however the outdoor sensor proved to be more tricky. Over the next 3 years the sensor was repositioned repeatedly, trying to keep it out of direct sunshine. When I thought I had it cracked, the Sun managed somehow to find the sensor at some part of the day giving false readings. I have managed to fix this now, but that deserves its own special post.

Anyway, being a techy sort of Guy I rapidly became aware that the weather station could output data to a computer via a serial port.

Now here was something I wanted to do! I've wanted to set up a personal web site for some time now, but didn't know what to do or what to make the site about. I resisted the personal "me and my family" type site, although as I was investigating my family tree at the time I thought a site about that might be somewhat interesting. I had free space with Blueyonder and decided to give a weather site a go.

The first issue was to find a program to capture the weather data. I wanted a program fairly easy to use, but with flexability regarding the publishing. After downloading a few trials, I decided to use a program called "Virtual Weather Station". I installed this on an old laptop computer and over time set up my first web site in early 2006.

The great thing about Virtual Weather Station (VWS from now on) is it has templates for webpages that allow you to publish a basic site very simply and quickly. All you need is to upload the html file created from the template to your own web space every 15 mins or so and you have your very own web site. You can customise the template to add graphs and pictures automatically generated by the program.

The first website, just called "WellingtonWeather" was put on my personal site at www.wellingtonweather.myby.co.uk. Over the next couple of years I spent quite a bit of time learning how to customise the template files and update in real time. I have no formal qualifications in programming of any kind so there was a lot to learn.

I must mention a couple of sites being instrumental in helping me along the road:

Ambient Weather's VWS forum, now sadly closed

An excellent site: http://saratoga-weather.org

And the very friendly chaps and chapesses at Midlands Weather Forum: http://www.midlandsweather.org.uk/

and obviously Google.

Early this year (2008) I wanted to make a site a little more appealing for a wider audience. One of my ideas was to have a weather facts section. I wanted to build a database for weather facts and trivia. Each time a visitor entered the site, a random fact appeared. This involved a huge leaning curve and also my ditching the free web space as they wont do database integration. I'll leave that to the next post.

As a point to note, if anyone has any ideas as how to make the site accessible to a wider audience, let me know. You can either comment on this blog, or sign the guest book.

I blame this whole creation on my better half's father - Roy.

If it wasn't for Roy's early morning weather report to his daughter nearly every day of her growing up years, I would not be living with a woman so fixated on knowing what the weather has in store.

I suppose, being fair, I also must take part of the blame as it was I who thought a good birthday present would be a weather thingy to tell her whether to put on that extra jumper or not.

We've had plenty of weather clocks in the past that offer outside temperature readings from external sensors that seem only to last a few months before packing up. I suspect they were designed for a less wet environment!

So being a complete weather novice and, as a bloke, not having much time to get the present sorted - it was only two weeks to her birthday, I went on to Ebay and found what looked like a good weather station for nearly half the UK asking price.

I got an Oregon Scientific Weather Station WMR968 ordered from Germany. It had a nice looking console, rain collector, wind sensor, outdoor temperature and humidity sensor and also an indoor temperature and barometric sensor- all the thingies a girl could wish for!

When it arrived (very quickly, I might add) I tested it and it seemed to work fine, with 3 minor problems. The mains adapter was the European 2 pin type and as the unit was  European and it would not automatically find the correct time. Also every time you pressed a button on the console it gave an annoying bleep which you couldn't turn off. To me these were no great problems. I used a holiday adapter to plug the unit in, set the time manually and opened up the console and cut the wire to the bleeper.

Anyway the birthday arrived and squeals of delight heralded the advent of many "brownie points" being earned (probably an English saying).

The very next day saw me climbing on top of the roof to fix the anenometer to the chimney stack. Whilst clinging atop, with a spanner in one hand and a bracket in another, I was wishing that I'd thought to change out of my shorts as I was in danger of installing a moon sensor as well as the anenomter (no mention of wind speed need be related as this point!). The sky was getting increasingly blacker from the south east.

A short while later my better half arrived in from work and stood shocked looking up as I triumphantly finished tightning up the last nut (there were only two though). All she could think of saying was:

"can't you hear its thundering"

All I could do was give her a withered look - a bit lost on her at that distance before sliding towards the guttering trying to make as an elegant descent as possible. From all reports I failed dismally!

Once on terra firma I positioned the other sensors in appropriate locations, now oblivious to the approaching storm.

By the way, all those brownie points lasted only about 2 days. It's amazing how quickly those things seem to evaporate :(