As part of the multiple changes I have planned, a weather condition icon has been added to the upper right hand corner of the page to indicate the current weather conditions. Sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy, etc. I just notice that I forgot to make the rain icons live. We’ve been in a drought ya know and I’ve only got so much free time. Guess those are next on my list, since we’ve got almost an inch of rain today!
Weather Condition Icons
February 18th, 2012The Blog is Back!
February 18th, 2012After a short hiatus the Benbrook Weather Blog is back online. It took me a while to get my website configuration sorted out. heh oh well, we’re back to normal.
New Theme & Mobile site Live
January 23rd, 2012As announced last week, the site has a new Theme! Additionally, for iPhone visitors you’ll see a mobile formatted version of the site. Hopefully in the near future, I’ll have support for other mobile devices. Drop me a comment if there is a feature you’d like to see added.
Some minor site changes Live today
January 20th, 2012Just wanted to announce a few changes that went live today.
- The most major change is I’ve implemented AJAX and JQuery to automatically update the weather readings every minute! No more 15 minute refresh! Woohoo!
- I’ve updated a couple of the graphics on the website. Some of the images were grainy and needed some touch-up.
These are the start of a series of major changes that will be coming in 2012. Some upcoming notable changes include a new theme, and a Mobile website!
2011 Weather in Review
January 5th, 2012Below is a month-to-month summary of 2011 weather. Read the rest of this entry »
New Camera
January 3rd, 2012After many years of service I’ve decided to replace my aging Axis 2100 camera with a TP-Link TL-SC3171. I’ve also started a project to relocate my camera. The trees in the back yard have gotten pretty big and have taken most of the shot. So I’m in the process of mounting the camera outdoors in a Lorex SG630 case.
2010 Weather in Review
January 5th, 2011Below is a month-to-month summary of 2010 weather. Read the rest of this entry »
Server Crashed, We’re Back Online
May 13th, 2010On May 3, 2010 I upgraded to the latest version of Virtual Weather Station. This turned out to be a BIG mistake. For those familiar with my Nuts & Bolts post the Weather Station is connected to the computer via a USB cable and some Serial Port emulation software. One of the feature changes of the most recent Virtual Weather Station (v14.01) is the ability to use USB connection directly. Long story, short, whatever they changed caused the software to stop working with an error “Could not connect to communications device”. After several days of trying to fix this, I decided to bite the bullet and convert my software suite to wview which runs on Linux.
The move to wview has several benefits for me. #1 I no longer need to license Windows for my weather station. #2 I don’t have to run a virtual machine on my server to run the weather station. #3 did I mention I hate Windows?
So, a quick status update about the site. Most of the graphs and graphics have been taken off because they were being generated by Virtual Weather Station. For now most of the vital information is being populated on the website. Over the coming months I will be working to create replacement graphs and graphics. toward the end my hope is to publish the software under GNU v2. So other weather station operators can setup a station, on Linux, and make use of the programs I use (in conjunction with wview).
Record Snowfall!
February 13th, 2010The snow started falling before dawn on February 11, 2010 and it didn’t stop until the following morning. When it was finished the Dallas Fort Worth area received a record amount, 12.5 inches of snow. Below are a few images I captured from this momentous event.
Snow clinging onto branches of a tree.
Snow clinging to the branches of a Bradford Pear tree.
Snow on a wrought iron fence and trees.
Snow on tree branches
Finally, I’ll conclude this post with three web cam videos chronicling the snowfall on February 11th and 12th, and the melt on the 13th.
Snowfall on Thursday, February 11, 2010
Starting to melt on Friday, February 12, 2010
More melting on Saturady, February 13, 2010
New Layout
January 11th, 2010In an effort to provide better service, we’ve made a change to the order information is displayed on the page. Hopefully you’ll agree the new layout gives you the information you need quicker then the old format.
If you agree or have a suggestion let us know by leaving a comment.