Tagged Weather

The weather system has easy access to view the forecast throughout the day. Check out the forecast tabs. In addition, there have been minor tweaks and adjustments throughout the weather system. Hourly forecasts now display 24 hours into the future (it was 12 hours). ZoneCast now displays daytime and nighttime forecasts for the next seven days. It was formerly daytime only for 7 days or daytime and nighttime for 3 days. Fixes for formatting issues and optimizing display items to get the most out of the weather system…

The News system has received a speed boost. Instead of loading the news every time you visit the page, it loads it on the server in the background. This trims off a few seconds to load the web page. News updates occur every five minutes... the news will never be old…

Today marked the completion of many of the missing pieces. Entering incorrect Zip Code / City information is now handled properly, as are ambiguous locations (you'll get a list to pick from). National Weather Service warnings, watches, and advisories will now display on the home page here. The Forecast Details now also contains Past Weather. You can create a PDF for your location with the forecast on it. The weather pages are cached for better server performance and the shading and colors have been adjusted…

After disappearing in early May, the weather forecasts are back and better than before. The site has switched from using Weather Channel data to using National Weather Service data. The engine that is powering the site is courtesy of HAMweather.com. You'll notice there is a lot more data available now. This is just the start... more updates are planned in the coming weeks. Future improvements will enhance the Radar display, provide severe weather notification, and other improvements.

Fixed the Captcha on the Gallery for public comments (it wasn't working before). Links Settings page no longer needs to reload when a setting is changed. Changes apply instantly without reloading the page. There is a new option to use AJAX for the details popups as well. The Forum, Gallery, and Links now generate Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs. Weather code has been optimized and loads faster. The weather module also remembers which day you were viewing when it auto updates. News system auto updates are faster and most of the processing happens with no noticeable impact…

The Site Authentication has been optimized and rewritten as a module. This simplifies management of the site - with a minor speedup. The Weather System has always allowed searching by city, but now it handles "city, state" as well. The "more quotes" page now has 15 random quotes, and a quote search function. The News System has improved the time display in the list, and has an auto reload feature. By default, it will auto update the news articles every ten minutes. This setting is configurable. The Home Page and News System both have improved image preloading on them…

It has been a long time since I have seen something that was revolutionary. I believe AJAX technology on the web is. Take for example the new weather code. Move the mouse over the days of the week. What do you think? That's AJAX. ;D The possibilities are endless.

Weather is Ajaxified- adding an update indicator, auto-refresh, and other good stuff on the backend. I am using the script.aculo.us Ajax engine. Home page has improved CSS code for the columns. Minor updates to Gallery and Webmail have been completed. The Family page now has improved reliability when accessing the Gallery. If you log off the Gallery, visiting the family page will automatically log you back in.

With a bit of "blood, sweat, and tears" ;D I have re-written much of the weather code. I gutted what I wasn't using and optimized what I was. You should notice quite a difference in performance. CSS in place of a nested IFRAME fixed part of the problem. Then there was the cache cleaning code that did nothing. I'm sure I could do more. Perhaps another day...

The home page contents have been juggled around a bit. The weather code has had some slight changes as well. You may have noticed the Google ads are gone from the front page (if you didn't :D then you were blocking ads). I'm working on a new news aggregator, but it's slow coming. Other changes recently include minor updates to the Gallery and Webmail.