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Launching of Weather

With this post, I am launching weather for my website. So, why and what is weather? This is inspired by recent weather events.

In addition to the ability to show a location, I’m also now showing the weather conditions at that location at the time the post was made. So, as this post was made, it was 43 degrees with showers(indicated by the icon).

I may tweak the presentation in future. The new additions to my location plugin include not only displaying the weather on a post, but a sitewide weather display as well as a new option to show the last location reported on a post…Will be testing that and the weather in the coming days as I take a trip.

I have an idea in future to grab this information from my phone, which has a GPS chip, but am not there yet.

As I’ve been backfilling weather on old posts on my site, I’ve also been fixing photo markup so that old photos will show up in the photo grid I added not long ago at /kind/photo. You can also look by year by adding the year to the end of the URL(/2020 or such). May add some links.

Simple Location 4.3.0 Released

Simple Location 4.3.0 has been released. This continues on the work released last week in 4.2.2.

Measurements in Simple Location have been stored in scientific units(celsius, meters, etc) since 2019, with an option to display in imperial on the frontend. With 4.2.2, the admin will now show in imperial units if you set the setting. This can be overridden on any page by adding the ?sloc_units=metric or ?sloc_units=imperial to the end of the URL.

4.3.0 introduces Meteostat and Visual Crossing as weather providers. Visual Crossing is the first provider that not only offers 1000 queries per day, but pay per use at a fraction of a cent after that. All of the other providers offering a free tier require a monthly fee after that point that well exceeds justification for the amount of posts even the most dedicated poster makes.

Meteostat is a historic only provider. It offers not only an API(key required), but the ability to download all data on a specific weather station(which requires no key). A future version of the plugin could download and cache the weather stations you use the most. For now, only the list of stations is bundled with the plugin, which it uses to determine the closest station.

The National Weather Service, the Met Office(UK), and the Custom Station plugin also cycle through lists of stations to find the closest one.

Expect more enhancements in the weather station category, with so many different ways to get weather stations data.

4.3.0 introduces historic weather support, for providers who offer this without a premium account. This includes Dark Sky(if you still have an API key), Meteostat(which only offers historic data), and Visual Crossing. If someone is paying for premium service on OpenWeatherMap and wants to talk me into adding this, send me a note.

The Fallback Weather provider feature introduced in 4.2.0, which allows for a secondary provider, will be checked if the primary provider does not offer historic weather.

Please remember, somewhere on your site, to provide attribution to the services you use. I’m off to backfill weather on my old posts.

From the email received from Stephen Burstin, who runs Jewish Walking Tours in London.

Spitalfields and Aldgate walking tour in London’s East End….The cost is £10 per person (payable on the day) and the tour is both informative and entertaining, including:

  • A visit inside the magnificent Bevis Marks Synagogue – the oldest surviving synagogue in England dating back more than 300 years and spawning several internationally famous sons. Discover why there was a staggering 156 synagogues in just two square miles of the East End
  • See the Jewish Soup Kitchen, lifesaver to thousands every day;  the first Yiddish theatre in England, scene of a real life tragedy; the site of a fatal gun battle between police and Jewish anarchists; and many other interesting sites
  • Hear heartwarming and heartbreaking stories, from the hilarious spiel of market traders in famous Petticoat Lane to the impoverished immigrants escaping East European oppression only to face wretched living conditions here and a life of toil in the notorious clothing sweatshops (and we touch on other immigrant cultures too). You will also learn about the infamous Jewish Catwalk where unsuspecting Jewish immigrant girls were lured into a tragic life of prostitution
  • Meet colourful characters from the past including the real-life 19th century Fagin; also the secret Jew who became the Queen’s physician; and England’s chief rabbi who told Russia: “DON’T let my people go!”  I will even tell you about the amazing Jewish connection with Jack the Ripper

The tour lasts around 2½ hours and there are plenty of stops and pauses plus a sit down in Bevis Marks for commentary about the synagogue (nominal admission charge to Bevis Marks).

It commences at 10.00am with us meeting outside the Aldgate Underground (Subway) Station – not the nearby Aldgate East Station.

RSVPed Attending Homebrew Website Club 11-20
I am planning on attending my first meeting of the Homebrew Website Club this week. This is a meetup of people passionate about or interested in creating, improving, building, designing their own website, in the same structure as the Homebrew Computer Club meeting, and is attended by the same group that does IndieWebCamp, which I am involved in.

Attending this event: yes