2006-02-09

Linking interests

As most people reading this will know, towards the end of last year I started work on a website to hold and display data collected with my WS3600 personal weather station. Also, since the latter half of last year, I've had a site up and running that holds online copies of my observing logs.

One of the things I do with my logs is note down the weather conditions at the time. I first started doing this in October last year, using a little Maplin indoor/outdoor thermometer. Since January this year I've switched over to using the WS3600.

So, I've got historical weather data on the weather site and I've got dates and times recorded in my observing logs. The next obvious step was to somehow tie the latter up with the former.

I'm not 100% happy with the presentation of the links yet, but I've now got a system up and running. If you have a look at this log, for example, you'll see "[More]" links next to the weather data. Clicking on any of them will take you to the weather data for that session (or observation, depending on where in the log you click) and it will highlight the period in question. By way of an example, if you click on the "[More]" link next to the temperature reading for the second observing session on 2006-01-11 you'll be taken here.

Okay, it's probably not that useful, but it was fun making it work and it's nice to have some sort of link between the two sites and the two interests.

Update: "[More]" is no longer the link. The link is now "..." followed by . Still not quite what I'd like (I'm not sure what I'd like yet) but, I think, a little cleaner than it was.

File Under: Astronomy, Weather, Personal Weather Station, WS3600.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice work there.

Dave Pearson said...

Thanks Rob. Still needs a bit of cleaning up but it's worked out rather well.

Anonymous said...

I agree, that is nice work. I keep a log with temps and conditions, it's scribbled in my Astro Diary and on napkins and credit card receipts...

Looks like you have some pretty cool stuff there!

Ian Musgrave said...

I love the ability to make graphs of the data, I work better with graphs. That is a seriously cool piece of work.

Dave Pearson said...

Thanks Ian.

One thing I'm hoping to make a habit of is trying to keep a log of my estimate of seeing and transparency (something I've not really done yet and should make a point of doing). It could be interesting to compare those values with the conditions recorded by the weather station.