Cave Country Weather Blog

The Weather Display software I use has upgraded the FTP upload module. This allows for uploads from my weather computer to the web server 4X faster. It also allows me to upload larger files. So taking advantage of this, I have added another video. The all day video from yesterday. The video will be updated each day at about 10:33pm. There is a link on the “Web Cam” page. Hopefully this will also let me capture some other cool all day videos for my archives.

My new webcam is up and running and I think this one gives me the best picture yet. It is a Logitech QuickCam 9000 pro. I hope this one will last for sometime. If not I will have to break the bank and get a real outdoor camera.

When posting here or other on-line blogs or forums, you may have notices “Smileys” or Emoticons” used. These are very helpful in conveying emotions that would normally be communicated using body language, but is lost when writing. While most posting area have an area where you can just click on the smiley to insert it into the post, I haven’t figured out how to add it to this blog…yet. So here is a cheat sheet that shows what to type in order to get the desired smiley. Be sure to put a space before and after so the smiley text is not mixed into the message text. These are standardized so they should work about anywhere. I have also noticed that many email programs are also allowing smileys.

We have had our first cold temperatures this week. This morning it was 28 and I think it froze my webcam. It stopped working sometime last night, so I hooked up another one that I have. It doesn’t have as good daytime picture although the night time is better.

I brought in my potted trees last night so they wouldn’t freeze. I guess I need to plant them one of these days. I had planted 6 of them already, but the rabbit ate 2 of them. Good thing I have backups. Should be back in the 70s this weekend so maybe I will get a chance.

Today Cave Country Weather joined the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP). Basically it is a centralized database where weather stations from the country up load data. Then this data is available to organizations. They word it much better “The Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) is a private-public partnership with three main goals: 1) to collect weather data contributed by citizens; 2) to make these data available for weather services and homeland security; and 3) to provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality. In fact, the web address, wxqa.com, stands for weather quality assurance.”
Information about this program can be found here.

We are going on 20 days with out any measurable rain and only .43″ total for the last 30 days. Last weekend I had a few drops on the deck, but not enough to do any good. I planted 6 trees 2 weeks ago & I have to water them every other night. There is a chance of rain on Monday night into Tuesday, but only 20%.

I have the ability to make a video from the pictures taken through out the day. However the completed videos are just under 1 gig and will fill up the hard drive quickly. I will turn on this feature if I think there will be some interesting weather during the day. Then I can convert the file to a smaller size and up load it for web viewing. The movies are just under 5mb in size and take a few moments to load.

Currently ther are just two videos located on the “Web Cam” page. One is a day where there are many different types of clouds blowing by. The other is the day when hurricane Ike blew over. The clouds are moving much quicker. In the future I hope to get videos of snow falling, thunderstorms, or cool sunsets.

I have been a little busy lately planning an additiion onto the house, so  haven’t had much time to mess with the weather station or web page. I made a few changes this week though. On the “Web Stickers” page, 4 more stickers have been added. Here are 2 examples.

These stickers can be added to web pages. So far only 2 sites are using a sticker, but they are cool anyway. The new stickers are updated every 5 seconds like the main pages.

The other change I made was to the “favorite” or “bookmark” icon. I changed it from the cloud and lightening bolt to an animated sun shinning. I had it working well and it looked good in FF, but unfortunately IE does not recognize the animation so I changed it back. It just displayed the default IE icon. Maybe someday IE will catch up with the other web browsers.

I am currently working on the webcam page. The animated section is turning into a video using windows media player. You may need to install the plug-in into your browser. It is scheduled to update at about 5 minutes after each hour and will be video from that day to the current hour.

A new page showing historical data has been added. This is provided courtesy of the Weather Underground. Cave Country Weather has been providing weather data to the Weather Underground (WU) since 1/27/08. WU has collected this info and allows me to add it to my site. Click on the “Historical” button to the left and it will take you there.