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Sample Banners as Labeled Station Examples

On the main station site, sample banners were labeled examples of station identity, units, and time—not a Cumulus GD generator or a skin gallery.

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A sample banner on a personal weather site is a picture of a status image, shown so another operator can see what a finished strip looks like. It is useful only when the listing labels three facts the pixels themselves often hide: which station produced the numbers, which unit system those numbers use, and when the snapshot was taken. Without those labels, a wall of attractive PNGs is a collage, not a set of examples.

The historical TNET Weather URL /bannersamps.php lived on the main station site (tnetweather.com) as that labeled listing. Recovered captures describe a catalog of submitted Cumulus PHP banners, sorted alphabetically, with a manual-approval form at the bottom. This article does not restore that form, does not rehost the images, and does not teach PHP GD. It explains how to read a sample strip as an observation example.

This page is not the lossy-summary article on how a generator compresses a station file into pixels. It is not a Cumulus-host gallery of files on disk. It is the station-site catalog: captions first, pictures second.

Historical context

Personal weather websites of the 2000s treated banners the way webrings treated site buttons: a 468×60-class strip for a forum, mesomap, or links page. /bannersamps.php sat beside the main site’s conditions and configuration pages as a show-and-tell—examples labeled enough that a visitor could tell one station’s Fahrenheit strip from another station’s Celsius strip.

A recovered capture states that the listing held on the order of two dozen entries and that submissions were for people already using a PHP Cumulus banner script, with both fields required and all entries approved by hand. Those details establish the old function. They are not a live census. TNET does not claim the original images, fonts, or submitter names, and it does not re-open a public upload.

The listing also pointed back to a Cumulus project index. That pointer still makes sense as a map, not as a download. The Cumulus overview is the research page for that software family. Sample banners on the station host remain a different object: examples with captions, not a generator package.

A sample is a labeled figure, not a live meter

Scientific figures in a paper carry a caption. A banner sample needs the same discipline, because the image is a lossy raster. Once temperature is painted as 72, a later reader cannot recover 72.4 °F from the logger, the observation clock, or the station identifier unless those facts are in the caption or in the pixels.

Minimum caption for a sample:

  1. Station identity. A name or ID that matches the configuration record, not a decorative callsign that disagrees with the live site.
  2. Unit system. Degree Fahrenheit or degree Celsius, inches of mercury or hectopascals, miles per hour or meters per second—stated next to the image even if the PNG already prints a unit glyph.
  3. Observation time, with zone. The clock of the snapshot, not the time the gallery page was generated. A sample without a time is a screenshot of unknown age.

Optional but honest extras: which wind number is shown (average versus gust), whether rain is “today” in local midnight or a rolling 24 hours, and whether any forecast phrase on the strip is forecast rather than observed.

A caption that says only “nice night banner” fails the test. Palette is chrome. Weather is the numerals plus the three labels above.

Why the main-site listing is not a generator article

Three neighboring jobs are easy to flatten into one essay. They are not the same URL.

Generator. PHP GD reads a local station file and emits a PNG. Mapping, caching, and hotlink load belong on /projects/phpggbanner. A sample page does not need GD. It needs captions.

Example files on disk. A Cumulus-host gallery answers “which filename is the metric night strip?” That is a path grammar. The station-site sample page answers “what am I looking at?” for a visitor who never opened the server’s banner folder.

Live status image. The file a forum hot-links changes with the packet. A sample must not share that filename. If the listing embeds banner.php, every “example” becomes whatever the station is doing this afternoon, and the catalog stops being a catalog.

Keep the sample URL on static files or on copies taken at a stated time. If you must show “current,” say so in the caption and accept that you no longer have a stable example. Do not call a live renderer a sample.

How to compare a wall of strips

A recovered listing sorted entries alphabetically by submitter or filename, not by time. Alphabetical order is a library choice. It is a poor scientific order. When you compare samples, hold one axis fixed:

  • Same station, different chrome. Useful for palette and density. Useless if the times differ by a season and nobody said so.
  • Same layout family, different unit systems. Useful only when both captions name the units. A bare 23 next to a bare 73 is not a conversion lesson; it is two unlabeled scalars.
  • Same time window, different stations. Useful for a webring snapshot. Requires a shared clock policy (UTC, or local time with the zone written out).

Reject comparisons that mix those axes. A dark strip from a coastal station at 02:00 local next to a light strip from a desert station at 14:00 local does not teach night palettes. It teaches that unlabeled galleries invite false pattern-matching.

If two samples disagree on a station’s temperature at the same labeled time, you have a data problem, not a style problem: different files, a stale cache, a timezone omission, or two stations sharing a display name. Fix the caption before you redesign the PNG.

What belongs in the pixels versus in the listing

The strip still has to be readable. Temperature, a named wind value, and pressure earn their space when each carries a unit. Station name can sit in the image or in the caption. Time is the field operators most often omit from the bitmap; that is why the listing must carry it. Do not encode temperature in the filename (banner-72f.png): alphabetical sort would become a heat index. Name files by layout family (ex-metric-day-468x60.png) and put the weather in the caption.

Indoor cabinet readings, pool thermometers, fire indices, and logger version strings belong in station diary pages. A sample that reprints the whole dashboard is no longer a banner.

Submission culture, without restoring the form

The old page invited operators to submit Cumulus PHP banners, required both fields, and queued entries for manual approval. That filter kept junk files out; it was not quality control of the thermometer.

A restored URL must not pretend that inbox still works. Do not add a fake submit form or a “service restored” notice. Keep examples as historical figures with captions, or as your own station’s documented variants. Third-party sample files in archives are other people’s pixels and often other people’s fonts. Acquisition of a domain does not transfer the right to republish them. Point operators who need a generator to current upstream documentation, not to a ZIP recovered from this hostname.

Practical checklist

  1. Caption every sample with station identity, unit system, and timestamp with zone.
  2. Keep samples off the live renderer filename.
  3. Sort or group by layout family or by station, and say which; do not imply chronological order if the sort is alphabetical.
  4. Label forecast text as forecast. Label derived indices (wind chill, heat index) as derived.
  5. Do not digitize sample pixels as a climate archive. Ask for the station file.
  6. Do not rehost submitted galleries whose licenses and fonts are unclear.
  7. Link the generator problem and the gallery-on-disk problem to their own URLs instead of duplicating them here.

Modern relevance

Status images still circulate in Discord, forum signatures, and status pages. The failure mode is unchanged: a pretty strip with no station, no units, and no clock. Treating /bannersamps.php as a lesson in labeled examples keeps the historical address honest and still helps a reader who is about to paste a PNG onto someone else’s site.

Station identity, units, and time are the metadata a configuration page should already record, and the first filter on whether a later product can use the observation. The weather-station hub collects the instrument pages beside this catalog. How public records are treated as evidence is data sources, quality controls, and methodology.

Sources