About

History

Meteotemplate has first been released in the summer of 2015. It all however started 2 years earlier. In 2013 I purchased the WH1080 weather station. It is probably one of the cheapest weather stations with a USB port on the market. The fact it has a USB port and can be connected to a computer was just great 🙂 I have always been a “statistics freak”, even when I was little, I kept track of anything from the temperature, to the number of cars that passed on our small street.
I didnt know much about websites, I had a vague idea of how a website works and created a very simple personal web using a WYSIWYG editor. Now I began researching the possibilities there are in terms of publishing weather station data. I first purchased a small router and flashed it with Meteobridge to allow realtime updates.
I found several website templates available already, but even though I was amazed by how much work and effor people have put into these, none of them really offered the details I wanted and even the design was something I wanted to be “my way”. So rather than installing these in a matter of a few minutes, I decided to start learning HTML and make my own template, despite the fact I knew this is not going to be a matter of a few days. Back then I was still studying masters degree at a Uni and I had a part-time job already in the Czech national weather service, but fortunately since I am one of those people who are ok with 4 hours of sleep/night, I spent nights coding. I never actually bought any textbook, I simply knew what I wanted to achieve and just used the trial/error method and kept trying and searching the web for answers, until I got what I wanted. It did not take long before I discovered that HTML is definitely not going to be enough and so I slowly got to know PHP, then AJAX, MySQL, CSS…. Over time I got some first results and I decided to create my first weather webpage. I registered the meteopage.com domain and started posting stuff there.
Over time there was more and more stuff and the number of visits increased. And I got a few emails from people asking if I was using any template and where they could download it. My reply was that unfortunately it is not a template, but a site developed from scratch.
It was at that moment that I started thinking about making this a template as well. The problem was that I knew this will require rewriting 99 % of the code. The page simply was not created with this in mind so there was no way of customizing it – all hard-coded in Czech, metric units, fixed styling, no solar sensor data etc. On the other hand, I thought that rewriting it as a template would be advantageous also because the first pages of my site I did when I knew very little about programming and I knew that I should have done some things differently and that in the future this would cause problems anyway and I would have to change the code.
Another thing was that I was aware of the fact that WH1080 is not very accurate and I cannot afford my dream station Davis Pro 2 Plus 😀 and since I live in a large city with several professional stations, my data is more like my hobby rather than something useful to anyone. And so I thought it would be nice if my effort of creating that site would be used by someone, whose data is much more relevant.
So I started writing the code from scratch, using my site as a source of inspiration (my site is here, but since I started meteotemplate I have much less time to work on this one). Even though I successfully graduated in June 2014, I already had a full-time and part-time job, so the situation was similar, I had to do it during nights, but I enjoyed it quite a lot. Also, I must emphasize that I had support and got to know many very helpful people, who offered help by reporting bugs, testing, suggesting new features and last, but not least, I felt it is worth it.

The template was entirely created in Notepad++, a text-editor with a built-in FTP client, which I highly recommend to anyone developing websites. I do not use any other programs for writing code as I find it easiest when I can just do everything myself and have total control over what is happening, even though it does take longer.

Credits

I would like to thank especially everyone on the WX forum, where I met some amazing people who were willing to help and support me in what I am doing.

HW and SW used

• Station: WH 1080
• Data upload: MR3020 router with Meteobridge
• Computer: Acer Extensa – Lubuntu Linux, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD
• Atom, Visual Studio Code
• XAMPP
• Filezilla