W8JKC

I have setup a new custom Weather Alert and SkyWarn Spotter Activation script through PHP and Twitter for Stark County, Ohio.

This project is currently in Live Beta Testing and I am encouraging anyone to “follow” the account; and if you wish, have them text messaged to your phone.

For now, this script will tweet any time someone views either of my WX-IMG for Stark County, which are currently used on many different websites.

This script will alert under any of the following conditions:

• Flood Warning
• High Wind Warning
• High Wind Watch
• Flood Watch
• Tornado Watch
• Tornado Warning
• Severe Thunderstorm Warning
• Severe Thunderstorm Watch
• Frost Advisory
• Freeze Warning
• Wind Warning
• Wind Advisory
• Wind Chill Advisory
• Blizzard Watch
• Blizzard Warning
• Winter Storm Watch
• Winter Storm Warning
• Winter Weather Advisory
• Any “Special” Advisory

• Spotters are encouraged to report
• Spotter Activation is expected
• Spotters have been activated
• Spotter Activation may be needed
• Spotter Activation will likely be needed
• Spotter activation is possible on “day”

“Day” meaning one of: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.

I plan to integrate this with my WX-IMG and WX-JS projects on a new project/website called WX-W8JKC which can be found in the near future at http://wx.w8jkc.com

I also plan on setting it up to check for Weather Alerts every 5 minutes and Spotter Activation every 2 hours, This will help to make it more reliable and help to prevent spam tweets with the same message.

The URL for this new Twitter account is http://www.twitter.com/starkohiowx

If you have any questions, comments, complaints, praise, etc; please email me at justin@w8jkc.com

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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

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