Station Status Notifications

Hi guys,

one of you recently asked me about the feature which sent an email notification whenever your station was offline.

This feature was discontinued in version 14. I just want to explain why. Obviously this was a useful feature, however, those of you who are using Meteotemplate for longer will remember that before the introduction of the API, all updates were done via CRON jobs. This has many disadvantages, relying on external CRON service in case your provider does not have this feature (or like in my case, has the shortest interval of 30 mins, which for our purposes is useless), other problems include unreliability, and most importantly, it was always the most difficult and problematic thing for people to understand.

The API has dozens of advantages, makes things a lot easier, faster and more reliable, however, this is one thing where it is disadvantageous. When the updates were handled by some external service (server, online CRON providers etc.), they could easily check how old the current conditions file is and send an email if it was outdated. However, this now becomes useless because the updates are triggered by the SW directly, could be Meteobridge, Weather Display etc. And so any notifications would be useless if the thing that is to be checked for functionality is the same thing that is supposed to send notification when it is not working. If it is not working, then the API is simply not updated at all so there is nothing that could send the email.