Upgrade!

As of today you will notice some new enhancements to the site! In a nutshell, improvements include:

• Better support for Internet Explorer 6.0.
• A widget for Yahoo! Widget Engine (credits to Pascal Dreer).
• RSS support…HOORAY!
• Bigger radar images in the library.
• An updated mobile interface.
• User interface cleanup.

One of the most important is better compatibility with Internet Explorer 6.0. After that, it’s the inclusion of support for Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 2.0.

I’m very excited about our RSS support. With RSS we can feed your weather to you through My Yahoo!, Google Home Page, Bloglines or the RSS news reader of your choice (I prefer Vienna, being a Mac user)! If you are new to RSS, Wikipedia has a page describing RSS and you can find a list of compatible RSS readers here.

So, what can you do with MyMetar.com’s RSS support?

• Access your personal MyMetar weather feed via the url http:///www.mymetar.com/<your nickname>/rss, replacing <your nickname> with your MyMetar.com nickname.
• Subscribe to the Radar Library RSS.
• Add your weather feed to a My Yahoo! page .
• Add your weather feed to your Google home page or Google Reader .

Enjoy!

Web Browser Sidebar

Web development is quite frustrating at times, especially when it comes to working through the idiosyncrasies of different browsers. Firefox (which I recommend), Safari, Opera, Camino, Internet Explorer (IE) 6, and now Internet Explorer 7 do not always treat “standards” equally, and sometimes the standards are left to interpretation by the developers. IE always tends to make things just quirky enough to make wasting away an afternoon on some minor formatting issue an all-too-common event. Hopefully that changes with IE 7.0.

Browser idiosyncrasies means that the user interface might look just perfect in Firefox, then degrade horribly in Internet Explorer. Since MyMetar.com was originally started as a personal project for my own use, I developed it to support Firefox. When my flight instructor, Jesse Armstrong (btw, if you’re in Houston, book some flight time with him – he’s good), posted a link to MyMetar to a pilot forum, everything changed. Support for IE became a must: IE has the largest share of the browser market.

Going forward, IE is part of our “quality assurance” process (me clicking on a bunch of links until something breaks).