PHP

Weather & Information Images (WX-IMG)

Sunday, December 27th, 2009
by W8JKC

I have updated my WX-IMG products and have included the WWV image in this release.
To add these images to your site please see http://www.w8jkc.com/copythis.php?q=1
You are free to add them to your website, Facebook, MySpace or similar profile, including web signatures.

Also included in this release is my simple email address spam blocking image script. It is very simple to add to any page, but requires basic knowledge of HTTP URL structures. However it is explained completely on the page linked above.

I have changed the methodology behind the Weather Spotter Image too, it used to refresh the data every time the image was accessed or loaded, which means every time somebody viewed a page that had that image in it, the information would be retrieved again. This works great, however now that more people are using that image I am using way too much bandwidth and I am sure the NWS and NOAA did not appreciate me requesting the information so many times. This is especially true because they usually only update the information once every 24 hours (around 6am). I have changed this to only request and update every 7 hours, which means 3 updates per day. Currently the update times are (EDT) 0700, 01400, and 2300hrs each day. I believe this is the most effective use, because we have had some afternoon and some evening storms.

If you have any questions or concerns you may email me at: Email Address
or you may simply leave a comment below.

Server Upgrade

Thursday, December 4th, 2008
by W8JKC

This past thanksgiving weekend I upgraded my primary server.

I backed up about 19 GB of data, including websites, configurations, and other important data. That took about 7 hours. After that was complete I DBAN\’ed the hardrives and proceeded to boot from a CentOS 5 netinstall disk. This took about 1 hour to download and install all the packages and format the harddrives.

Here are the details of this server:

RAM: 380 MB, soon to be upgrade to about 1GB.
CPU: Intel Pentium 3 (667Mhz)
Graphics Card: ATI Rage 3 128 RF/SG AGP

Main HD: 10GB Fujitsu MPF3102AT
Second HD: 80GB Western Digital WD800BB-55JKC0
Network Card: 10/100 MBPS Intel Corporation 82557/8/9/0/1 Ethernet Pro 100

Mount Points:
/boot EXT3 /dev/hda1 122 MB
/ EXT3 /dev/hda2 6.2GB
/tmp EXT3 /dev/hda5 1GB
/var EXT3 /dev/hdb1 72GB

Note: You can view this systems details at any time by visiting http://wcatserver2.wcatnews.com

I attempted to install an Hosting Control Panel package, but it didn\’t work. Maybe later I can install a package such as ISPConfig (http://www.ispconfig.org)

This server is better with page load times, and speed than the old one. On average it took 30 secs or more to load this blog from the local network. Now it loads in under 10 seconds. Ideally after the RAM is upgraded it should load in under 5 seconds.

If you want more information on this box , please leave a comment or email me.

I am setting up a Mail, Mailing List, and Web Server on this machine, along with the Stark Scanner feed for http://scanamerica.us
You will notice on the right menu bar below the iTunes Video of the Week, a new Web Player of this feed.
For now I set that to plat Chicago FD, due to the fact that the software to broadcast the audio is not setup yet.
Server1 (http://wcatserver1.wcatnews.com) will host backup Web, IRC, and other software.

Both servers support SSL, PHP, and MySQL.

WX-JS Officially Released

Thursday, October 9th, 2008
by W8JKC

I am now officially releasing WX-JS, a free project that allows you to add dynamic Weather Alerts to your website through a simple javascript code.

This project coincides with my WX-IMG project, and uses the same data from an RSS feed over at weather.gov, which is updated about every 5 minutes.

Currently, these scripts grab the feed from weather.gov everytime the script is accessed, and the more people who use these projects, the more bandwidth it will use from my ISP, and to weather.gov

The next version of these projects will include a 5 minute server side cache of the data from the weather.gov feed, and will tell the browser to cache the image or data for same expire time as the feed cache.

This will allow more people to use my script, with less server load on my end, along with bandwidth to me and to weather.gov

To use my WX-JS script: Visit this page for instructions.
To use my WX-IMG script: Visit this page for instructions.

Current Users of my WX projects:

http://www.wd8aye.net

http://www.myspace.com/tricountyrescue

http://www.myspace.com/cstechnical

http://www.kd8gpm.com