| PleasantWeather was
founded in 1998 in Pleasant Ridge, MI. It moved to Huntington Woods in
2000 and began active record-keeping in 2001. It was redesigned in 2007
with dynamic data driven by MySQL databases and PHP. |
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Macromedia Dreamweaver is
a professional visual editor developed by Macromedia for creating and
managing Web sites. Many of the pages were done in raw coding,
but this software brought the whole site all together. |
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Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady are
a best-of-breed photo editing package. From the ever-changing PleasantWeather
logo/header to CSS background images, Photoshop was used on elements
of every page. |
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Davis VantagePro wireless personal weather station. With an occasional firmware upgrade or sensor replacement, the original station purchased and installed in 2001 still drives the data for this site. |
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Hamweather seamlessly integrates real-time weather information into about two-thirds of this site. The php-version of Hamweather provides forecasts and data from across the U.S., Canada and other nations of the world. |
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LunarPages. PleasantWeather.com
is
hosted at LunarPages. The switch was made in Nov. 2006 from a Tier 2
provider. Price, access to MySQL and other tools were influential in
the decision. |
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Firefox
2. The
award-winning Web browser is now faster, more secure, and fully customizable
to your online life. The most useful add-ons for this site were Firebug
and IEView. PW.com recommends Firefox. |
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BBEdit 8 is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, all of the PHP on the site was written in BBEdit. |
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Made
with a Mac. This site was designed on a
MacBook Pro and PowerBook G4 with assists from and MacMini and iMac.
A G5 running
Leopard Server is used for staging, testing
and local image processing. |
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FeedForAll. Robust
RSS feed creation software. Easily create, edit and publish RSS feeds
and podcasts with desktop software. PHP scripts RSSMesh, SQL2RSS and
RSS2SQL create the aggregated news feeds used on the site. |
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CSSEdit
2 . The CSS used on this site could
easily have been done in Dreamweaver. But the best way to learn CSS
is dissect another site, and there's no better scalpel than the
extraction and X-Ray tools of CSSEdit. |
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Google
Maps is a key component of PleasantWeather.com.
These applications (Michigan
Weather, Michigan
Webcams and Detroit
Golf Weather) combine PHP and XML. Here are
three important ways to get started: Google
Maps Mania, Google Maps
API and Google
Maps Tutorial. |
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Office
2004 runs great on a Mac. The data
for NWS records were massaged in Excel before importing into MySQL.
Entourage is the best possible client for Exchange. But, alas, I used
Access in XP to work with the raw weather data. |
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Weather icons. This nice set of PNG24 weather icons and moons by JiriK was originally designed for use
with Serious Samurize and now is included in MediaPortal, an open source
media centre software. |
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Virtual
Weather Station is the most popular
and complete solution for connecting a weather station to a PC and
the Internet. VWSql is
an add-on for VWS that feeds data to a MySQL database. The history
search and graphics are adapted from VWSql code. It runs on a Dell
Optiplex. |
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Thumbnail
Viewer II from Dynamic
Drive is used in
the WeatherCam page. |
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Gifsicle. Gifsicle
is a UNIX command-line tool for creating animated GIFs. |
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ImageMagick has
been a mainstay of this site since 2001 for processing weather images
from a command line. It can read, convert and write images in a variety
of formats (about 100). It runs excellent on a Mac running OS X. |
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Weather
Underground is the source of weather
maps for this site. They're the premiere Open Source meteorology web
site. PWcom also uploads data ever 5 minutes to their servers for
personal weather stations. |
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PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for creating dynamic web content. PleasantWeather is running off PHP 4.1.x |
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MySQL,a
multithreaded, multi-user SQL database management system that has, according
to MySQL AB, more than 10 million installations. |
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Navicat is
a powerful MySQL database administration and development tool that is
sophisticated enough for professional developers, but easy
for new users to learn. Navicat™ allows quick access to create, organize
and share information. |
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Affrus. There's
still quite a bit of Perl running background processes. Affrus is
an integrated Perl editing and debugging environment for Mac OS X that
wraps Perl in a standard, familiar, and intuitive user interface. |
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NewsEngin deserves
a special thanks, not so much for this specific endeavor, but for their
tutelage in all things PHP and MySQL in my day job with the Detroit
Free Press. NewsEngin creates smart database systems for
print and online. |
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Color
Schemer Studio is
a color matching application for anyone from hobbyists to professionals.
Work with a dynamic color wheel, instantly explore harmony
and even let it intelligently suggest color schemes. |
| Other credits: Code
for the contact form was obtained from Mike
Cherim. We rely heavily on cURL,
the Open Source command-line tool for automating downloads. The best
way to implement Open Source code in OS X and OS X Server is by using
Fink and Fink Commander. |
