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Paul

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Blog Entries posted by Paul

  1. Paul

    Winter Specials

    By Paul,

    With winter fast approaching and the second cold spell of the season on the doorstep, there are some great offers available for [url="https://www.netweather.tv/secure/cgi-bin/login.pl"]NW Extra [/url] subscriptions currently to help you stay completely up to date.

    Features within NW Extra include, detailed local and national forecasts, the weather type radar which is updated every 5 minutes and detects whether rain, sleet or snow is falling, a huge range of charts - including exclusive access to the hi-resolution NMM model for the UK, live weather information, strikestar lightning detection, regional snow risk charts, long range forecasts and maps, and much more.

    There really is no better way to ensure you're right on top of the weather this winter! [url="https://www.netweather.tv/secure/cgi-bin/login.pl"]Click here[/url] for more details.
  2. Paul
    Tonight see's the launch of a new competition on netweather, with the winner having the opportunity to have their winter outlook published onto Netweather as the 'official' alternative winter forecast. (the winner will also receive a 1 year subscription to Netweather Extra).

    To enter you don't have to be a forecasting expert or have loads of technical knowledge, you just need to have an idea as to how you will create your forecast and the methodology behind it. Put simply, your forecast could be based on anything from nature to pattern matching, to lunar cycles, to the QBO and NAO - in other words anything that you think is relevant no matter how technical or non technical it is.

    At this stage you don't need to produce your forecast, you just need to outline your method and give any other information you think is relevant, the closing date for this part of the competition is the 29th October (at 23.59). Once all of the entries are in, our forecasting team will create a short list of entrants, those on the shortlist will then go forward to a public vote on the forum which will start on November 1st.

    The winner of the public vote will then be invited to provide their forecast by the end of November, once written it will be displayed on the Netweather site throughout the winter with full credits to the author.

    The competition is open to everyone (except the forecast team here on Netweather), you don't have to be a member of the forum to take part, just click the link below to visit the entrance form:

    [url="http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=winterlrf;sess="]http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=winterlrf;sess=[/url]

    If you would like any more information, please feel free to comment into the blog or see the competition discussion in the Autumn forum.

    Good luck!
  3. Paul

    Busy Busy Busy

    By Paul,

    The Netweather community has been a pretty lively and busy place over the last few days as snow has been rattling across the country.

    Over the space of 48 hours during the Sunday and Monday (1st and 2nd Feb), over 13,400 posts were made which if you average it out right across the period means there were nearly 5 posts a minute, every single minute! Those who were online during Sunday morning will have seen we took steps to make sure the servers didn't slow down or crash by upgrading them, we were glad we did as that evening we set a new record for the amount of users online with 1233 people all the forum at once, which hammered the previous record of around 670 which was set just a couple of weeks beforehand.

    Over the last few days we have also welcomed more than 140 new members, so welcome to you all - it's great to have you onboard!

    I need to say a big thank you to our team members who have done a sterling job in keeping things well organised and flowing along nicely during this extremely busy time, thanks too to all the members who have contributed to the great atmosphere on here!

    Paul
  4. Paul
    As you may have seen in [url="http://www.netweather.tv/forum/index.php?showtopic=49142"]this announcement[/url], there have been some changes made to the netweather forum, including the addition of new community forums and groups. We're pretty excited about the possibilities and opportunities that this brings for the community, and already a few groups have been started, which you can take a look at [url="http://www.netweather.tv/forum/index.php?showforum=118"]here[/url]

    All groups are free and open for anyone with an interest in the subject to join and take part in, so you can get together with other like minded members of the community to discuss topics, create projects, arrange events or just socialise. The aim isn't to dilute the ongoing areas of the forum, so if for instance someone wanted to start a model watchers group, members of that group would still be encouraged to post into the main model discussion thread on the forums, then within the group they could perhaps discuss other aspects of the models, learn more about how they work, talk about interpreting the output and so on.

    The idea is that when a group is started, the group leader(s) will look after that group, will be able to setup topics, moderate as required (with the team's support) and look to bring people into their group and take the group forward in the direction they want - it's a real opportunity to make a part of netweather their own.

    On top of this, the blogging system has been changed to allow multiple editors of a blog, so a group could set up their own blog with several editors and use that as an extension to the forum areas. The blogs will also soon become much more customisable with a variety of skin and header options and even the option to design your own look and feel to them. (More on all of this will be posted in a 'how to' thread on the forum shortly).

    If you would like to start a group for social purposes, research, to organise an event, to get some like minded individuals together to discuss a particular subject or whatever else, please feel free to [url="http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=contact;sess="]contact us[/url] and we'll get it set up for you.

    Paul
  5. Paul

    A Cd Who?

    By Paul,

    Evening all, what a fun start to February it's been! The site has been really busy - serving over 2 million pages a day on a few days and over 12.4 million pages already this month.

    We'd been looking at ways to increase capacity on the website as our traffic has more than doubled every year for several years now and we didn't want to end up in the situation where the site ground to a halt and then having to act as it's not good for you - our users and it's a recipe to end up panicking into sorting a solution which isn't good in the long term.

    What we've been using more of is a CDN, for those who aren't techie, CDN stands for content delivery network, and what it basically means is that we've been putting some of our content onto this network and letting their servers deliver it to you. This has several great advantages, one is that it takes some load off of our core servers and the second is that the CDN we're using loads our content onto servers around the world with huge capacity for traffic, so wherever you are and no matter how many try to access that content, you'll always get it from the server nearest to you (meaning good speed) and it'll never slow down because of too much traffic.

    One of the items we've been putting through the CDN is the images from the GFS chart viewer ([url="http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=nwdc;sess="]here[/url]) and why? Because so many of you are using them - which is fantastic to see, with over 20,000 charts being requested from there every hour at times!

    Anyway, enough rambling about CDN's (which incidentally our new video content will be using too), thanks for reading - and please let us know if you have any suggestions for the chart viewer - we want to keep developing and encourage more and more people to use it.

    Cheers

    Paul


    PS - If any of you are seeing slightly slow speeds on the gfs chart viewer, please let us know by [url="http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=contact;sess="]clicking here[/url] as there have been one or two teething problems which we can solve quickly if we know about those with the problem.
  6. Paul

    Free Weather For Your Website

    By Paul,

    As many of you will be aware, Netweather's 4web service enables anyone with a website to display a local forecast on it, just be copying and pasting a few lines of code.

    Today, we've added some brand new templates to the system, giving you a greater range of designs and sizes to choose from. Three of the new designs are shown below:

    [attachment=68889:1.png][attachment=68890:2.png][attachment=68891:3.png]

    We're also going to continue to add further new designs over the coming weeks, with at least 2 more being added every week for the next month or so. If you would like to add your local forecast to your website, please visit the 4web page by [url="http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=4web;sess="]clicking here[/url] , it's extremely quick and easy to generate the code, and is then simply a case of copying and pasting it onto your pages.
  7. Paul
    Long range forecasts are always a hot topic, and with good reason - the ability to predict weather patterns a long way in advance is extremely useful!

    From a commercial perspective it can be hugely important, a retailer with a reasonable understanding of the upcoming weather can plan stock purchasing, promotion and staffing levels more effectively, energy companies can plan for demand, event organisers can put contingencies in place and plan around likely conditions, and so on.

    From the public perspective, weather is a popular conversation topic and an important part of our daily lives, so, for instance knowing if it's going to be a hot summer or cold winter can help us plan how we're going to live, plus of course it give us a decent subject for discussion both offline and online.

    The problem is though, that some 'weather companies/forecasters' know that long range forecasts are important to people and a popular topic of conversation, so they use them to get publicity for themselves. For instance forecasts telling of severe storms and snow in winter will get coverage for their business or website, so often they may get issued with that in mind. In my opinion, these sorts of forecasts give long range forecasting a bad name, and responsible forecasters a difficult time as people become wary of trusting forecasts having been burnt by one or more spurious forecasts.

    If you're one of those people who has been burnt believing some of the crazier predictions in recent years, just bear in mind that outrageous predictions of specific events months in advance, or of the coldest winter since records began are likely not to have been designed as a source of information, they're more likely to have been written with creating publicity in mind. So take them with a huge pinch of salt and instead listen to likes of the Met-Office or Netweather and other forecasters who use respected modelling data and/or up front lrf techniques who always present what that data shows whether or not it's hugely newsworthy.

    For me, long range forecasting is still an unproven science with no-one nailing the perfect way to do it yet (and maybe no-one ever will), but the way forward is certainly not to use them as publicity stunts, it's to present things as you see them in a realistic way, whether that means getting on the front page of the papers or not...
  8. Paul

    Popups - Aaaarrggghhhhh

    By Paul,

    Hi all, just a quick apology for you - it appears that over the last few days one of the ad companies we deal with (or should I say used to deal with) have, without our knowledge been putting a sneaky popup onto the site when one of their banners shows. The popup was nothing malicious or anything, but as we have a no popup policy on netweather (and always will have), it's obviously not on!!

    As soon as we found out about this last night we pulled all of their ads, and following on from discussions this morning we've made the decision not to use them again because of this.

    So sorry if you got one of these popups, we hate them as much as you and it won't happen again!

    Paul
  9. Paul
    Just a very quick entry - we've put together a selection of the photo's that have been sent into us of the snow this week which you can view here:

    [url="http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=snow-uk;sess="]http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=snow-uk;sess=[/url]

    Thanks to everyone that has sent their video and photo footage in - please keep it coming! Address to send it to is:

    [img]http://www.netweather.tv/images/nwtvemail.png[/img]

    You'll also see on the page that we're on the lookout for some weather reporters across all parts of the UK - if you fancy sending the occasional weather report to us and have a video camera then please drop us a line for more info:

    [url="http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=contact;sess="]http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=contact;sess=[/url]

    Paul
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