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About the Port Orford Wide Weather and Tide page
The powwt has many useful features. The powwt started out as an online local tide page, and has had a few features added over time. This page is something like a powwt help page about the features that have been added. Generally, if the font is yellow over a brown background, it is either a clickable link or a button. When the mouse hovers over a link, the links will display their target in the status bar at the bottom of the browser (if you have the status bar enabled), but when the mouse hovers over a button, the target won't be displayed there. The links and buttons are described below, working down the powwt page. 1. Clicking on the header labeled 'Port Orford Wind Weather and Tide', you will be taken to a page that has an image that can be adjusted for size. On that page, clicking on the 'Select New' will provide a small assortment of clickable thumbnail images. By clicking on the header again, you will return to the normal powwt. 2. The 'PHP POWERED' icon is a link that will bring up your email program to send me an email. 3. The white Weather Box is a link to take you to the wunderground weather site. 4. The '62 feet above sea level' information link comes from the Geographic Names Information Systems (GNIS) site. 5. The 'MLLW' link is a NOAA link to a page explaining the Mean Lower Low Water level reference. 6. The 'Tides for (day of the week)' link is a NOAA reference link to the page from which the tide for the day is determined. In 2012, NOAA changed their format. They now have a grapical display, as well as a text versiion. 7. If a tide is at or below -1.5 feet, the background will turn green in that display area, indicating more favorable conditions for beach goers. If the tide is at or above 8.5 feet, then the display will turn red in that display area, indicating less favorable conditions for beach goers. These values are adjustable, but only at the server. If you are reading this and would like to suggest better limits, feel free to send me an email (see '2.'). 8. The 'Port Orford Tide Utilities' is a button that will take you to the various tide search programs. These programs can provide specific information about Port Orford tides for the current year, like a tide height, the tides on a date, or a change in sea level. There is a description page available to learn more. 9. The 'Cape Blanco Wind' link will take you to the NOAA source used to create the table of data showing the wind speeds observed in 15 minute increments. This data display can get wonky on the rare occasion, as I'm scraping the NOAA web page for their data and they will sometimes adjust their data fields, which means I then have to adjust the scraping algorithm. I'm not always near my development machine, but I always try to keep up with these changes as soon as possible. Google 'website scraping' to find out more about various website data harvesting techniques. 10a. The 'Last Observed' button is basically a refresh button for the wind data (and the whole page). 10b. The 'Mph' button will sort through the last 24 hours of wind data and provide the 5 highest Mph readings, decending in order. 10c. the 'Gust' button acts like the Mph button, but sorts only gust data. 11. Finally, an easter egg button is found under the visitor number. It's clickable, and will take you to a page that will show you the IP list of all of the visitors for the day. Upon each visit to the powwt, the visitor's IP address is recorded. This daily list is then sorted for unique numbers. If a new number appears, the unique count will increment by one. The total number of visitors for the day and the the total number of unique visitors is stored for the day. At the end of the day, the total unique visitor count is added to the previous running total unique visitor count. This cumulative unique visitor count is then divided by the accrued number of days in the year to arrive at the annual daily visitor number. Looking at the hit count page gives the annual daily unique hits. The IP addresses are not stored, just the hit counts. In the beginning, there were about 8 unique visitors. Now there are about 25 (August/2011). Most of the page hit counters you see on the web today are non-unique. You can tell if you look at their page counter and hit reload on your browser and the count increments every time. As time goes on, I plan to add some extra features. One feature will be a high wind and gust history for the year(s). One feature that was suggested by Alan and Brenda Mitchell was to highlight the wind direction that shows favorable winds to collect glass floats. |