CASI Members, You haven't heard much from me lately because I have been hard at work on a number of things on the CASI site. In addition, CASI has been receiving more media attention lately than it had in the past and this has driven me to make some of these changes. I was interviewed over the phone today for an article in the High-Point Enterprise (newspaper in NC) about this spring's weather in the Carolinas. In addition, Dr. Dave Walker, the on-camera meteorologist at FOX8 in Johnstown PA has contacted me with positive feedback about CASI and I am going to meet with him next week to see what CASI can do for his television station and vice-versa. Other BIG News: +StormForm now automatic!! It's what you've all been waiting for... the StormForm (www.weatherwatchers.org/stormform) Storm Reporting System is now automatic! That is to say that when you submit a Report it goes up automatically into an Unprocessed Reports area of the Website. For an example of what it would look like see a Sample Report at http://www.weatherwatchers.org/stormform/unprocessed/.example Notice that the directory will contain all the Unprocessed Reports, with the date _of_the_event_ as the filename. Click on that and you get the automatically generated report. This should quench the thirst of the Internet Public for *recent* storm reports and give me some breathing time between your submittal and my integrating, which was taking several weeks due to lack of time on my part. Now when you submit, it appears immediately, and I reformat it and link it in to the proper section of the Recent Weather page when I can. This is about as automatic as it can be, due to people not always submitting the dates or submitting them in a consistent format, or submitting the whole form blank or without enough info. How did I do it? Perl and CGI, both which I thought I had forgotten after not having used them since last fall practically ;) More on how I did it later. +Recent Weather Events Section Overhauled!! I finally got around to reformatting and overhauling the Recent Weather Events section of the CASI Website (www.weatherwatchers.org/recentwx.html). The page was getting too long because of the success of the StormForm so I split it up into 1998 and 1995-1997. If you have any reports on your website that you would like me to link to please let me know and I will add them. I think the new design is better looking and more functional. I will be posting this address to the newsgroups after I make a couple more modifications including a "Featured Storms" table to direct people to some of the reports - this would rotate between different reports on a weekly basis probably. **I have added a LOT of reports to this section, interspersed over the last couple years, including some old, old reports of mine from when I first had my videocamera in 1995. It's funny looking back on my reports my web design just gets lamer and lamer the farther back I go. ;) Anyway please browse through this section again and take a look at all the new reports. Let me know if there are any broken links or typos on any of my stuff. http://www.weatherwatchers.org/recentwx.html +Membership Forms Automated! Doesn't matter to you but it does to me - the CASI Membership Application Form now automatically goes into a tab-delimited text file that I can import into Excel - instead of cutting and pasting for an hour. More Perl and CGI. Happy days! +Upcoming Features: A couple other things I have been working on heavily but which aren't up just yet: -A tutorial for the SPC Severe Weather Event Plotting Software SVRPLOT -A page comparing the major NEXRAD Internet Data Providers and what they offer All recently submitted StormForms and Member Changes (prior to today) have been done. I had to put off New Member Processing until next week due to all of the above things. I have to admit the lack of Tropical Weather (and Severe Weather in PA lately) has allowed me to do all this, but for the sake of any of you that are weather-bored this time of summer, I hope it doesn't last! -- ============================================================== Jesse Ferrell - Meteorologist/Web Dev. - j{at}weatherwatchers.org Central Atlantic Storm Investigators - www.weatherwatchers.org "And here a twister comes... here comes the twister." --Talking Heads || ICQ No. 136862 || --------------------------------------------------------------------- ************************************************* Central Atlantic Storm Investigators Mailing-List To Post: casilist{at}weatherwatchers.org To Cancel: lists-admin{at}weatherwatchers.org Archive: /members/casilist *************************************************