Monthly Archives: March 2017

Weather Site

UK Weather Network & Meteobridge Pro

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Chatteris Weather has been publishing weather data to UK Weather Network (UKWX) for a number of years when Martin from UKWX Admin mailed to let me know my data was no longer being shown.

Originaly Weather Display was configured to send data to UKWX and during the changeover to Meteobridge Pro this got missed, fortunatly in Martins mail alerting me to the problem was a link on how to configure Meteobridge.

MB instructions

I followed the above steps but couln’t get it to work, Martin kindly gave me the details of Bob Montgomery owner of Bishop Sutton Weather Station who also uses a Meteobridge, and he was very willing to offer advice in order to help me get the data created in a format which UKWX can injest.

This is what I learned with help from Bob:

  1. Open MB_stickertags-template.txt
  2. Copy the contents of the text file and past it into Notepad (I use Notepad ++)
  3. Save this file as MB_stickertags-template.txt
  4. Upload this file to your server, for ease I placed it in the root directory
  5. Set the file permission to 666
  6. In Notepad create a blank file and save it as MB_stickertags.txt
  7. Upload this file to your server, for ease I placed it in the root directory
  8. Set the file permission to 604
  9. Open Meteobridge Pro and select the Services tab
  10. Create an FTP and select periodical upload
  11. Enter your site details and update frequency as per the example below  (don’t forget to use yoursite) and press SAVE
  12. .Press TEST
  13. Using your browser enter www.yoursite/MB_stickertags.txt and you should be able to see your data
  14. Using the UKWX Contact Form, let admin know of your details
Example MB
Example MB Pro Services Setup

 

 

 

All done and time for a coffee!

Weather Site

Weather Station for WordPress added

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Weather Station Logo

Added Weather Station for WordPress to my blog pages, the application needs the following to work:

  • PHP 5.4 or greater;
  • cURL extension;
  • JSON extension;
  • Internationalization support.

My native setup 4.6 provided by GoDaddy had 3 out of the 4, with Internationalization support missing, and thefore the app would not run.

Talking to GoDaddy techincial support, this was resolved very easily.

  1. Use cPanel to access your site.
  2. Click on ‘Select PHP version’.PHP page
  3. Click on the ‘PHP Version’ drop down box and select 5.6 and click ‘Set as current’, by default ‘inil’ is checked.
  4. Click ‘Save’ and all is done.
php version
Weather Site

Chatteris.biz SSL secured

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secure

My main domain name is Chatteris. biz, Chatteris Weather and M0HTA.uk are  linked to this domain name.

In order to give users confidence that the site they are linking to is secure, I have upgraded to SSL.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browsers remain private and integral.

During the transition it was found that some of the existing information displayed broke the security integrity of SSL, and therefore, I have either changed the menu to the remote link directly or removed the link completely, this has been unavoidable.