PHP weather scripts and software guides
Guides to PHP weather scripts, RSS feeds, coordinate conversion, Weather Display climate parsers, GD banners, software provenance and offline testing.
- Station RSS as a Machine-Readable Observation ContractPersonal-weather-station RSS is an observation contract: items, units, timestamps, and coordinates, plus hygiene for stale, unescaped, or timezone-ambiguous data.
- Reading /index.rss as a Weather Data File, Not a Web PageTreat /index.rss as an XML data file, not HTML. Content-type, caching, timestamps, and missing fields for consumers of a well-known weather feed path.
- Station Coordinates: Decimal Degrees, DMS, and Why 0.01° MattersA 0.01° station-coordinate error is about a kilometer. Decimal degrees versus DMS, WGS 84 versus assumed datums, and why metadata errors break climate maps.
- How Weather-Software Projects Were Packaged and CreditedHow Weather Display and Cumulus community projects were packaged, versioned, documented, and credited, and why a public index mattered more than a file dump.
- Why Weather-Script Archives Need Provenance, Not MirrorsWeather-script archives fail without license, version, hash, and source. What a responsible downloads page records, and why TNET does not rehost unclear packages.
- Weather Banners as Lossy Summaries of Station ObservationsPHP GD weather banners are lossy summaries of temperature, wind, and pressure. What belongs on a status image, how to cache it, and why hotlinking failed.
- A Shared PHP Tooling Layer for Personal Weather WebsitesWhy PWS websites needed a shared PHP tooling layer: parsers, graphs, banners, and include templates as engineering problems, plus security and licensing lessons.
- Weather Display Year-Climate HTML Is a Fragile Data SourceWeather Display climatedatayearout.html is a fragile HTML source. Why monthly and annual summaries are not logger dumps, and what to quality-control before graphing.
- Publishing a Climate Table from a Parsed ArrayAfter parsing climate HTML, publishing a table still needs month indexes, missing-month handling, unit labels, and a validation checklist that CSS cannot replace.
- When Two Climate Parsers Disagree: Units, Water Year, and Trace RainA second Weather Display climate export, climatedataout.html, often disagrees with year-file parsers. Check units, water year versus calendar year, and trace rain.
- Weather Display Average-and-Extreme HTML as a Climate SampleWeather Display average-and-extreme HTML is a climatological sample, not a population. Averages versus extremes, month sample size, outliers, and extractor breakage.
- Golden-File Tests for Weather PHP Without Public Debug URLsPublic /test/ PHP endpoints leak fixtures. Golden-file tests, ClientRaw and climate HTML fixtures, and how to regress parsers without exposing a live debug URL.