I started working on a newer, better version of my Charleston surf report website last weekend. It’s been up for two years and has been a funky one-page site with lots of data from various sources. This is fine, and I get something like 20 people a day visiting. But it could be a lot better. I’ve been exploring the idea for a while and started getting my hands dirty over the weekend.
You can view the progress of the redesign here. I’m building it in CodeIgniter. MVC has made wiring up my sites SO MUCH easier. I get the impression that people like other frameworks better (like CakePHP and, obviously, Ruby on Rails), but CodeIgniter was pretty easy to learn and is what I’m working with at the moment.
I didn’t get very far this weekend. I’m using cURL to connect to the National Data Buoy Center to collect the latest buoy observations. Then, they’re stored in a database for later use. (The current site connects to the NDBC every time the site loads, which is just inefficient.) The site also submits the buoy data to my @charlestonguide and @myrtle_beach Twitter accounts.
The new site will be a lot more of a community. I’m going to give people the opportunity to report the surf themselves. Let’s say you went out for a morning session. You could log on with your iPhone or on your laptop when you got home and make a quick post about how it was so other people could get the latest from someone who had actually been in the water. Some of the data will be standardized and quantitative, but some of it will be user comments so you get a feel for it more than just numbers. Is this better than hearing the surf report from someone who is staring at it from the beach? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s something else so there’s room to make it happen.
The various user-submitted reports will be averaged as the one “official” user report, and all of them will be listed seperately so site visitors can browse them one-by-one.
There will still be official NOAA data like forecasts and buoy reports, etc. but I think it would be more fun to make this site something more than just robotic weather data.
That’s where I am now. More updates in the future.
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Six months have passed. This is how it goes sometimes. I had good momentum for a few days working on this site, but other projects and commitments took precedence.
Lowcountry Surf has a small but dedicated following. I should build them a better site and bring them together. But it will have to wait.
by Sean McCambridge on January 03, 2010 at 6:24 pm