But for other, more specialist projects, especially for more sophisticated web page designs, some straightforward development work may be needed. Many of the features and options are available more or less ‘out of the box’ by use of built-in presentation formats for a local display or templates for web pages. How much configuration or webpage design work is needed to create one of these data presentation will vary. So, in practice, local and website displays can look very different.
That said, there are ways of updating even website displays essentially in real time but these need special add-on software programs, as detailed below. Finally, website displays may be constrained by the amount of data that can be uploaded to the website and by how often it’s practicable to run an upload.
Sometimes, completely separate programs written by different designers are used to generate the website displays and so personal designer preferences can also account for major differences in the look of a given presentation.
These two types of presentation often end up looking very different because different software techniques are often used to display data on a web page compared to those commonly used on local PC displays. So the webpage displays can be used perfectly well to distribute weather data around a local/private network, eg within a building or site.) There is absolutely no reason why a webpage display cannot be viewed locally as well – potentially without uploading to a remote web server if you don’t wish to do so. (NB The website-type displays simply present their weather data in web pages, which can be viewed from anywhere. We’ve divided these examples into two groups: those as viewed locally on the PC linked directly to the weather station, and those that are designed to be used on a website. (The main exception is provided by loggers that can connect directly to a network without needing a local PC, such as the WeatherlinkIP logger – these provide the simplest possible way of presenting live weather data on a website – see image above – but inevitably with some limitations in how flexibly the data can be presented.) Most of the screenshots below are generated by PC software and not by network-connected loggers. The weather station needs to have a PC interface or data logger, which will, typically, be cabled to a PC for processing by software running on that PC. The basics of creating PC and webpage displays Your browser does not support inline frames or is currently configured not to display inline frames. This particular example uses the Davis 6555 WeatherlinkIP data logger uploading automatically to the central server site at Most users will very readily be able to recreate this sort of data presentation on their own websites, but see below for illustrations of many other options.
Even this varied selection is just a sample of the of the available displays – there are many compatible programs nowadays each is able to show the data in several layouts and there is scope for more variety because some webpage displays can be used in combination with more than one source program.Īs a first illustration of what’s possible, the live webpage example below (of current weather at our workshop at Ely in East Anglia (UK) this display should update automatically every 5 minutes) is easily created without specialist knowledge and at relatively low cost. The screenshots shown are generated by various weather programs compatible with the Davis stations and show local PC displays as a first type and then, further below, webpage displays. This page includes some brief introductory notes on the different types of display that can be created and then the screenshots further below provide a wide range of examples. Modern weather-station software can generate impressive presentations of weather data on both local displays and on web pages.