Author Topic: Do It Yourself?  (Read 1795 times)

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Offline Gerald

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Do It Yourself?
« on: September 16, 2017, 12:32:37 AM »
In order to have rapid fire updates and having your own station be the default station, is the only alternative to create your own weather web page or are there other personal weather station display services out there that will do this?
Jerry
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Offline Bushman

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #1 on: September 16, 2017, 11:52:04 AM »
Need low cost IP monitoring?  http://wirelesstag.net/wta.aspx?link=NisJxz6FhUa4V67/cwCRWA or PM me for 50% off Wirelesstags!!

Offline vreihen

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2017, 02:10:47 PM »
As far as I know, WU is the only game in town offering to share quick updates with the public.  PWSweather only appears to show 5-minute intervals now, and their data-ingest mechanism seems to have a 1-2 minute delay processing every sent observation.  APRS doesn't even want to see people send data more frequently than every 10-15 minutes.

Some of the home-grade weather stations offer varying levels of web/app viewing of your own data.  If your only goal is to access your observations remotely (and not share with the world), these may be adequate for you.

With the general dissatisfaction with WU, I have more than once given a half-hearted thought to setting up a small service that lets PWS owners build their own weather portal pages, and supporting the WU rapid-fire protocol.  Do you think that it would be financially viable (self-supporting)?  Would there be a demand for this type of PWS hosting service?????
WU Gold Stars for everyone! :lol:

Offline dupreezd

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #3 on: September 16, 2017, 05:03:42 PM »
@vreihen
Quote
With the general dissatisfaction with WU, I have more than once given a half-hearted thought to setting up a small service that lets PWS owners build their own weather portal pages, and supporting the WU rapid-fire protocol.  Do you think that it would be financially viable (self-supporting)?  Would there be a demand for this type of PWS hosting service?????
I think there will be a demand for it due to the issues with WU.
What do you have in mind, something like GoDaddy where people host their own websites or more like WU where there is a standard template and data gets uploaded?

I think the biggest issue will be #1- bandwidth and #2- Data Storage.
Are you going to run your own servers our rent from a place like Rackspace or Azure.
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Offline vreihen

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #4 on: September 16, 2017, 05:51:29 PM »
My thought was a cross between the two, sort of like WordPress for web sites and blogs.  Provide a hosting service like GoDaddy and others, but be focused on PWS owners.  Have all of the major templates available for simple deployment, and a standard default one.  If someone wants to customize, they have full access to choose/tweak whatever template they choose.

I manage over 150 servers for a living, so there's no major technical challenge for me.  Some people are totally lost with setting up and managing their own web hosting, and this would be the target audience.  Spinning up another web server on my Amazon AWS account is just a few mouse clicks, and the personal Piwigo image server that I've been running on there since the Photobucket implosion back in July has been 100% rock solid so far.  No server room required. :lol:

Honestly, I think that the biggest hurdle would be to get the approvals of the various template owners to package up their stuff and make it easy to deploy for each person.  I know that Jachym always points at non-commercial restrictions on some data sources, but I don't think that it really applies.  Under the WordPress business model, they are a hosting company and not responsible for the content posted by individual users.  The same thing could apply to PWS hosting.

The only question is if there would be enough interest and revenue to support itself, especially trying to match WU's $0.00 price tag?  Granted, you get what you pay for from them.....
WU Gold Stars for everyone! :lol:

Offline dupreezd

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #5 on: September 16, 2017, 06:28:46 PM »
Quote
I manage over 150 servers for a living
A bit less at 137 VMware VM's, some connected to an EMC SAN via fiber :-) and about 2 dozen physicals. "you don't have to be crazy to work in IT, but is does help"

Reading the posts, there are quite a few that use GoDaddy for their hosting which they pay for. You will most certainly attract them, and me.

With the big push to SSL, it might be possible and register as a CA and you can issue Certs. I wonder if one wild card Cert will cover all the sites on one webserver. Certificates is not my strong point.

Dream big  :grin:
« Last Edit: September 17, 2017, 07:34:55 AM by dupreezd »
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Offline vreihen

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #6 on: September 16, 2017, 08:08:05 PM »
With the big push to SSL, it might be possible and register as a CA and you can issue Certs. I wonder if one wild card Cert will cover all the sites on one webserver. Certificates is not my strong point.

Ironically, I spent three days this past week rotating an expiring wildcard certificate out on a couple dozen web VM's running various apps/functions.

For non-financial applications, Lets Encrypt (100% free certificate signing) is more than adequate for SSL brownie points in Google's search ranking.  One of the major reasons why I spun up my Piwigo image server on Amazon AWS and not my personal paid hosting company is because the hosting company wanted to monetize certificate sales and will not support Lets Encrypt.  I wanted to see for myself that Lets Encrypt was a stable solution for future use with my own stuff.  Here's a direct link to one of the images in Piwigo on that server.  Feel free to check the certificate data:

https://images.hvtraffic.com/images/2017/07/09/20170709134130-fea5db63.jpg

The best part is that the Lets Encrypt system supports automatic certificate renewal every 90 days, so managing it is completely hands-off.  The only pitfall is that they will not sign wildcard certificates, so each hostname will need to be set up to manage its own free certificate.

If the certificate above renews itself before the 10/6 expiration date, I'm calling that experiment a success.

Long story short, technology isn't a roadblock.  Seeing how much time Jachym spends support MeteoTemplate every day (and licensing of the various templates) gives me pause, since I already have a full-time job.  In addition, my health is far from stable enough where I would feel comfortable asking someone to trust me with maintaining their PWS data.....
« Last Edit: September 16, 2017, 08:10:02 PM by vreihen »
WU Gold Stars for everyone! :lol:

Offline dupreezd

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #7 on: September 16, 2017, 08:15:42 PM »
Quote
For non-financial applications, Lets Encrypt (100% free certificate signing) is more than adequate for SSL brownie points in Google's search ranking.

Wow, funny look what I downloaded this morning. Have not played with it yet. Running IIS 7

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Offline hankster

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #8 on: September 16, 2017, 09:43:25 PM »
I could see a problem supporting more than one or two templates. When NWS or any of the other services that are used to get data makes a change to their API or feed you would have to update all of the templates on all of the sites.

Offline Gerald

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #9 on: September 17, 2017, 01:59:30 PM »
I'm glad my post created this much interest. I belong to what I assume is the majority of PWS owners who are more weather geeks then techies. We just wan to get our data out there and use the full potential of our hardware and the software then runs it. It bugs me when the capability to update data almost immediately can't be utilized especially during storms.
I have found that the WunderStation app still seems to support rapid fire but many in my neighborhood use my WU web page for local Wx info. They are complaining to me that sometimes it appears the data is an hour old. I could try to get everyone to download WunderStation but would much rather have the web presence.
I am not up to much of what you have discussed in the above posts so I'll just monitor things and hope you guys with the appropriate knowledge can solve this to the point it's viable both operationally and financially.
Jerry
Altoona, IA

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EW7358
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Offline ocala

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Re: Do It Yourself?
« Reply #10 on: September 17, 2017, 04:06:56 PM »
Jerry there is another option called Weatherlink IP but it's kind of pricey.
https://www.davisnet.com/product/weatherlinkip-for-vantage-stations/
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