The weather portion of this website updates itself with current
information every 10 minutes, around the clock.
The current and historical web pages consist of 8 HTML text files. The clickable
portions of these pages require another 18 HTML text files, for a total of
26 essentially static files, with only the current data ever
changing.
Updating and uploading all of these files every 10 minutes wasted a lot of time and
bandwidth. So, we modified these 26 files to all load and run three
Javascript files, called "Data.txt", "THWData.txt", and
"W10AData.txt". These files plow through the currently-displayed HTML file looking
for specially-marked text fields (like "outsideDewPt"), and populate those fields with current data; they're
also responsible for some "special effects", like the text strikethough and graphics shading when the wind chill and heat index
(which Davis' software always generates, no matter what) are actually invalid.
(Why three files, you ask? Because Davis' otherwise marvelous software inexplicably doesn't track highs and low for THW
and 10-minute average wind, so we have to do that ourselves, outside of Davis' system.)
By using "Data.txt", "THWData.txt", and "W10AData.txt", we reduce the number of HTML text files which must
be updated every 10 minutes from 26 to 3, and reduce the total upload size of these text files from over 100KB
to under 23KB.
Please note that clicking on either the Davis logo or the "Click here for..." at the top of any main
page (normally redirecting you to Davis' website or the indicated text, respectively), or any of on the values
shown in the left-hand column (normally redirecting you to individual history displays) also won't work with
JavaScript disabled (as we use "onclick=" for each area).
Thanks for your interest in why we do what we do. Use this "comments
welcome!" link (or the one on the bottom of any of our main pages) if you'd like
more information.