Re: php Weather

[Martin G. <gim...@gi...>]

lee <dav...@bt...> writes:

Hi Lee (and the rest of the Internet...)

> Just a quick mail to say I came across and am enjoying your php
> Weather program; if you fancy a look at it in use with my cheesy
> attempt at a 'sky and clouds background', it is here:
>
> http://www.incelsite.com/phpweather/index.php

No comment on the background, but the weather comes up nicely :-)

> I don't mean to criticise because I'm not a programmer, but there
> appear to be a few little bugs with it.

That's very likely...  That's why I'm forwarding this answer to the
phpweather-devel mailinglist, so that your problems can be recorded
for the future.  Having the discussion there allow others to pitch in.

> I believe I have used the latest version and am using a MySql
> database. I read the useful docs thoroughly, but did find it hard to
> work out how to customise the index.php page to stop it appearing to
> be a test page.

Yes, this is not stream-lined at all.  I guess my inital intention was
to have the index.php page there to show how PhpWeather is used.
People should then go build themselves another page from scratch, and
incorporate PhpWeather into it.

> My main trouble there is not understanding how to work with the css
> template, so my chosen fonts and text colours in index.php were not
> working. I'm not familiar with using html with a template or in a
> file also containing php.
>
> In case it's of any use to you, here are the little bugs I've so far
> come across:
>
> 1)  When the weather report is shown for the entered location, the
> time when the reading was taken sometimes looks fine but sometimes
> says it was taken thousands of hours ago (!) so I have re-jigged the
> report to just say "The readings were taken within the last hour."
>
> 2)  When viewing config/index.php, the config appears to sometimes
> lose or not show all my config as saved in defaults.php, which is
> uploaded to the phpweather root folder.

Yes, the make_config.php script always start from the default
settings, it is not meant to be used to re-edit the configuration
(which would then allow people to see your passwords etc).  But I can
see why you are confused, so we should probably state it more clearly.

> 3)  My choice of default station appears to be being ignored. I wonder
> if my revising of stations.csv (see below) has caused corruptions or
> problems here.

Nah, I don't think it should do anything bad.  Unless you have deleted
your default station from the file (which I considuer unlikely) then
it should work.

> 4)  I am a little unclear as to the use and reliability of the
> supplied download/update features, although haven't yet come to any
> solid conclusions.
> I have however managed to use a text editor to scan stations.csv and
> remove any mention of airports, aerodromes etc in the station names
> (just my preference !) then upload the revised file and get the
> program to use it.

Great!  We could consider shipping such a stations.csv file with
PhpWeather, and also translating it into other languages.  This could
maybe be done quite efficiently if people just had to translate words
like 'airport' and 'aerodrome' etc.  I'm just brainstorming here :-)

-- 
Martin Geisler                                  My GnuPG Key: 0xF7F6B57B

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