AhwatukeeWeather.com displays the local weather here in Ahwatukee Foothills, a residential community, and a part of Phoenix, Arizona. It provides data from our own personal weather station, as well as links to other weather stations in the area, local forecasts, etc. This website is interesting for a number of its features.
The weather display includes a number of gauges and displays which are updated every 3 or 4 minutes. They are fed by a program called Virtual Weather Station, Internet Edition (which in turn is fed data from the weather station hardware). The program uploads a series of images to the server, which represent the various displays from the weather station. It also builds the Data and History page, uploading it to the server every 2 hours.
Forecast information also comes from Virtual Weather Station, which downloads the data from the National Weather Service and Weather Underground, then builds the 2 forecast webpages, uploading them to the server every 4 hours.
The site has a real-time webcam (almost real-time - updated once per minute). It is fed by a program called CamUpload. This program captures images from the webcam, and uploads them to the server using FTP.
One of the most interesting features is that the home page uses AJAX / Javascript to refresh the weather data and webcam once each minute, without the user having to refresh the page.
The site also shows data from other personal weather stations in our area. This is accomplished through Weather Underground, which provides small blocks of code for each weather station that can be embedded in a website to display the current weather conditions at that station.
This site is also another example (like D2 Web Design website itself) using the templete software Artisteer 2. |