New free weather app

A few weeks ago I was approached by a local web developer with an offer of an alternative front end to my existing weather data service. He needed a simple solution that would fit well with the website design concept for one of the clients and my existing three different versions of the weather app did not quite meet his specification. In a quid pro quo arrangement, I ended up with a new weather app to share with the rest of the world while the client gets the benefit of a tailor-made weather information widget for the newly developed site.

So, here it is - I am officially unveiling weather app v4 for your perusal.





Default setting is for Sydney but you can easily change location by adding a city code at the end the URL link. For example, for Canberra the full address is like this:

http://aus-emaps.com/ww4/index.php?code=YSCB_Canberra

Full instructions on how to set up this weather app on your site and a list of city codes are available on aus-emaps.com free widgets page.

My free weather widgets are quite popular, generating over 1 million page views per month (250,000+ visits). Not surprisingly, also getting some attention from mobile users (almost 10,000 visits in the last 30 days).

This latest arrangement gave me an idea - maybe there would be other web developers interested in designing their own versions of weather app? Hence, I am inviting all interested parties to have a go at creating alternative weather widgets with my data. I will provide a sample code and a copy of the database tables to get you started. Only two conditions – the app has to be hosted on aus-emaps.com and it has to have a link to the site. Keep me posted if you are interested!


Related posts:
Weather widget take 3
Free Australian weather widget
Weather widgets via Google Gadgets
Weather on Google Map
Weather maps for winter resorts
Hazmon weather map

Ingres Db adds spatial capability

The latest version of Ingres relational database now also includes support for geospatial data. GIS functions and spatial data types are included out-of-the-box (i.e. do not require additional plug-ins) and make it easy to enable web mapping. Ingres 10S supports spatial applications, such as Esri’s ArcGIS for Desktop and FME but also MapServer and GeoServer.

Ingres 10S is supported by other programming libraries including GDAL/OGR and GeoTools, allowing import, export and manipulation of vector data. Ingres 10S leverages the GEOS geometry and PROJ cartographic projection libraries for manipulating and transforming spatial data between dozens of geographic and planar co-ordinate systems.

Ingres 10S is an open source, enterprise grade database, not as popular as MySQL or PostgesSQL but, as the other options, can be downloaded and used for free. Ingres was first created as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1970s. Since the mid-1980s, Ingres has spawned a number of commercial database applications, including Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, NonStop SQL, but also open source PostgreSQL (which with PostGIS extension is the most popular open source spatial database).