As most of you know I have a “personal weather station”. That means I have weather instruments installed around my house so I can tell what the weather is at any given moment. I bought my first one back in 2007.
For a weather buff like me it wasn’t enough to know what the weather is like I also like to be able to see what it was like over the day or last few days or weeks, or even months.
Weather Underground is a weather site that features weather reports from all sorts of places. One of those is many, many personal weather stations. When I got my weather station I started looking for how those personal weather stations (PWS from here on out) were able to post their weather.
I learned that there are various pieces of software that can do this but the one that seemed best was one called WUHU for Weather Underground Heavyweather Uploader. Heavyweather is a piece of software that comes with LaCrosse weather stations which is what I started with. You run that software which saves the weather data to your hard drive every few minutes and then you run the WUHU software and it uploads it to WU. I ran like this for a while and then I learned that WUHU could run by itself without having to run the Heavyweather software. I’ve been running in what is called “serial mode” ever since.
A few years ago when Twitter got popular some people started asking about some way to use WUHU to not only upload to the weather services but also to Twitter. I had played around with Twitter and I knew how to write programs using Microsoft’s Visual Basic so I took a crack at it.
I created a program that I call WUHU_Tweet. WUHU has a feature where you can call another program at any interval you want. I created WUHU_Tweet to use this feature. WUHU calls my program and inserts the weather data into some placeholder “variables” and then publishes the Tweet.
I made it available to the WUHU community and it’s fairly popular. I’m not sure how many people are using it now but I have seen people in several countries plus quite a few in the US using it. I have been using it for several years and so far it has made roughly 31,200 tweets.
About a month ago someone asked if it would be possible to post weather reports to Facebook. I knew you could always make your Twitter posts go to Facebook but I felt it would be better if you had some control over how often you did it. Someone told me about a Facebook app called Selective Tweets which allows you to make a Tweet go to Facebook by just adding #fb to the Tweet.You can see it in action on webtrafficgeeks.com
I modified my program and was able to make it so you put in a number as a counter which would then put #fb onto every nth tweet. I tested this out on my Facebook account. I started with twice a day but Donna and a few other people were complaining about it so I cut it down to once a day. Some were still complaining so I stopped it altogether.
I guess the experiment worked but the concept was a failure. I’m not going to remove the feature, because it worked, but I will not be posting weather tweets to my Facebook page anymore.
To see some info about my program check here, and here, and here or my Twitter Account at http://twitter.com/winnetkaweather.
If you could predict earthquakes several hours early, everyone would want the program.
Comment by Mom — Sunday November 18, 2012 @ 12:07 am
I’ll get to work on that… 😉
Comment by Don — Sunday November 18, 2012 @ 12:08 am
OH!! I didn’t realize those posts were from your own backyard weather station. I thought you were pulling info from NOAA (the National Weather Service). This makes a difference and helps me understand better why you posted them. May I suggest you add a more interesting and perhaps colorful format of reporting? Maybe something similar to the weather app on the iPhone? I think it was the plain text that made lots of sense to a meteorologist but not to a dumb lay person like me that made them uninteresting. But if you added some graphics, I’d like them much better. (I think I’m a kid at heart.)
Comment by Donna — Friday November 23, 2012 @ 5:39 pm
Remember this is just a copy of a tweet so the challenge is to get as much weather info into 140 characters as possible.
If I was to ever create a Facebook only application I would try to make it look a lot prettier.
Comment by Don — Friday November 23, 2012 @ 6:01 pm
There are lots of graphics that play well on Twitter. There’s your challenge… write a program that will create a colorful tweet that you can then feed into FB.
Comment by Donna — Friday November 23, 2012 @ 6:11 pm