Stability v12.0 - Update Details

By Justin Poublon

January 28, 2024 - 9:50 PM CST |

Happy last week of January! I'm back to provide a quick rundown of the latest website update, which I'm calling Stability v12.0. The following is very text heavy so apologies in advance.

NWS Warning Feed

NWS warnings will once again flood the maps and widgets across the site! It was a lengthy, tricky process to rebuild the logic to pull from a new data source after the old source was depreciated. This new setup is leaner and cuts down on some of the extra unnecessary information. The only warnings we'll have in our system are those currently active. Notifications will remain turned off until I can finish remapping fields.

Facebook Integration

For years I've struggled with where to provide updates and when, repeating myself between platforms. Now if I post to Facebook, that update will come here too! Every minute the site scrapes the Wisconsin Weather Facebook page for new content or updates to existing posts. Clicking a Facebook post here will take you straight there. A future project could be to display the fb post - in full - on this website.

Home Page - runnin' it back!

The preexisting idea was to focus on a single feed of information but it made the home page feel stale. Bringing back the home page featured widget adds some life & excitement. I'm excited to see it work when the storm action heats up again!

Currents obervation Fix

All along the system just needed a kick start. I got the current observations database running yesterday and very pleased to see it back.

Optimization/house cleaning

I have a long term goal of reducing most of the least used pages, maps, & features on the site. Old strategy was to increase in size, now we need to downsize The idea is to focus on what makes this place special! If I ever take something away you enjoy, please let me know! Never deleted, just disabled 😄

Known bugs

There are a few such as Active Warnings feed always showing none. Recent stories widget & news page are broken. 7 day forecasts have a roaming glitch caused by timeouts in the data processing. I would like to fix these before starting on v13. Besides the forced issues, all the glitches we've had were caused by moving servers and lack of maintenance. We're turning the corner!

Future Plans - v13

I have something new on my mind relating to graphics but waiting to share until I'm further down the road. I want to notifications back on and will investigate the options, email vs text. I miss waking up to new warnings or watches messages! There will be more optimization & bug fixes. Life couldn't be more chaotic so I'll need a minute, I'm hoping March time-frame. It'd be amazing to start posting actual forecasts, blogs, and vlogs.

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy the improvements and until next time, enjoy life!