How Is This Data Added To The Website?

General Web Dev
1

I’m trying to figure out how the buoy data (for wave heights) is being collected for display on this page:

http://www.greatlakesurfers.com/weather_spots

This might be helpful, http://data.glos.us/glcfs/ but I still don’t know how to take data from another page and display it on a website. Ideally, I’d be able to create email alerts when waves reach a certain height at the buoy closest to Cobourg Beach.

Thanks for your help!

2

Hi rykelo, welcome to the forum,

It’s being done server-side somehow.

Have you contacted them and asked them about it?
Do they have an API?

Note, the site has this

Copyright © 2014 Great Lake Surfers
All rights reserved.

So we can’t help you steal content.

3

Often data like that will be available via some portal or API, though you may have to pay for it.

4

Thanks ralphm! I reached out to the guys who built the site and they wrote:

Hi Ryan, we used API from WeatherFlow, I forgot how we contact them, I think our client contact them and request data for API access from WeatherFlow Inc. Also you must know that we build this about 3 years ago and than was only few spots for bouy heights on Greate Lakes, and that spots where near some ship marines. We used Drupal OpenSource CMS for that, I created cron job function that runs few times a day and collect data from predefined spots and for now its only 4 spots.

I’d like to learn how to do this! I know http://www.codecademy.com/ offers some excellent free learning courses, but I don’t even know what server-side language matters here.

A point in the right direction is a big help, thanks!

(also, for the WeatherFlow API, there’s a way to contact them here: http://www.weatherflow.com/data-and-application/weatherflow-datascope/weatherflow-api/ but I don’t even know what I’d ask. Maybe something like, “Hi, I’m trying to build a notification app around wave height data from the Cobourg Beach buoy. May I access your API?”)

5

It’s nice of them to reply like that. :smile:

That sounds reasonable to me. They would probably give you some indication of the options for connecting to their data. Then you could either work out how to go about that, or perhaps hire someone to do it for you (which is pretty common). If you try it yourself, feel free to ask for assistance here, although I’m not the one to help with this, I’m afraid!

6

Hi Ralphm,

Is there a better area on SitePoint for me to search for assistance with this? I’d like to learn how to do this myself. I’ve had no luck gaining access to Weatherflow’s API because nobody is returning my emails there. BUT, I have gained access to the wunderground weather API, I just don’t quite know what I should do next.

http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/

Thanks for your help!

Ryan

7

I would start by reading through their documentation: http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs

That will give you an idea of what you need to know. You will have to get into programming, and if that’s new to you, there’s a fiar bit of work to do before specific tips on setting this up will be very helpful to you, I’d say. But anyhow, as long as you can formulat a specific question, at each step of the process, I’m sure people will be happy to help around here—say in the PHP forum, if that’s the language you are working with. (I notice the Wunderground site also has a forum, where you might als get specific help with this API.)

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