Oxford Weather Development Blog
Behind the scenes at Oxford Weather.com
Coding day
Nov 10th
A good day today updating lots of coding.
The forecasts had dropped off because of new coding at weatherundrerground, an update of the PHP solved that quite easily.
More problematic though was the UK Quake script which refused to work at first, by combing 2 pages and updating the fly-out menu we achieved success. 
Now the UK Quake page offers a list of the top ten most recent quakes and a clickable map which takes you to the British Geological Survey site.
New site
Feb 18th
New site
No sooner was there a brand new sexy site up with flash animation…than it was replaced by an even better site.
We’re just putting the finishing touches to it now before it goes live in the next few days.
Where the old site focused on live data, this still has all the current conditions but allows a much better drill down of historical data allowing you to see climatic trends.
RSS updates to Facebook
Feb 3rd
Our existing way of pushing images to Facebook was proving less than reliable, so we’ve moved today over to RSS graffiti, which looks far more promising and should be able to update our Facebook page much more frequently.
If you’re wondering, we push direct from our weather software to Twitter at five past the hour, every hour. The RSS feed is then picked up and pushed to our facebook page.
500 Days
Jan 25th
We noticed a few days ago that we missed our big anniversary last Saturday of 500 days monitoring and publishing Oxford’s weather. A good milestone, happy birthday us !
Feeds
Jan 24th
Just in case you didn’t know ;
weatheroxford Twitter
The main output is via Twitter, we feed at 5 minutes past every hour the latest weather conditions in Oxford. This includes the temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction and overall condition.We feed a forecast each day at 6.55am for the day ahead, and most evenings around 7pm or 8pm for overnight. At weekends and bank holidays there’s normally one forecast each day at 7.30am. We have over 300 followers on Twitter who get the conditions pushed straight to them every hour. If you don’t want to do this you can always visit the website.
weatheroxford Twitter page
The website shows live conditions 24/7 and holds all of our archive data. From here you can view graphs and historical records.
There’s now a smartphone app, works with iPhones, iPads and Android operating systems.
There’s a facebook page too, which refeeds the Twitter output.
iPhone web app
Jan 23rd
We’ve just got the iPhone web app going. We’ll test it for a few days before officially announcing it. It works with the iPhone, iPad and Android – although we’ll test it out with all of these this week.
Oxford Weather iPhone WebApp
If you fancy a sneak peak, with the iPhone for instance – enter http://www.oxfordweather.com/iwdl/ in Safari and there you go. It’s a web app but if you want to use it like a regular iPhone app just …
- Surf with Safari to http://www.oxfordweather.com/iwdl/
- Tap the + – sign in the bottom toolbar of Safari
- Choose 2nd option (put on home screen)
- Give it a name of your liking
One advantage of this is it gives a full 9 day forecast (that’s more than the web or Twitter feeds do). So far this has been tested succesfully on an iPhone 3, iPhone 4, iPad, Android & Blackberry Bold.
Welcome
Jan 23rd
Welcome to the Oxford weather.com blog. As we build the website we’ll keep you up to date here with the things we’re trying and how they work out.
Oxford Weather.com