a widget and resurrected RSS feeds

[Mo]

My partner Charlie has developed a widget so a sorta ibiseye lite that
can be inserted into any Web site. It's already up on several NY Times
regional newspapers' weather pages.

When there are no named storms brewing, the widget shows "points of
interest," which can be waves, areas, or points. Tropical waves are
the ones to watch out for because they're most likely to become
depressions, etc.

If a named storm emerges, the widget immediately changes its display
to show the latest forecast path for that storm. This is a quick way
to keep your users updated on the latest official storm track. And
because the widget lets you customize what it shows, it's often better
than just offering an ugly graphic from a government site.

To start using the widget, just paste this iframe into your site's
code:

<iframe src="http://www.ibiseye.com/widget.aspx?
height=500&width=500&lat=27.36&lng=-77.5&zoom=4" width="500"
height="500"
scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" hspace="0"
vspace="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"
></iframe>

To customize your display, adjust the URL within the iframe with these
settings:

Width: Sets the width of the widget. Be sure to also set this within
the IFrame tag itself. They should be the same. Minimum is 250.

Height: Sets the height of the widget. Be sure to also set this within
the IFrame tag itself. They should be the same. Minimum is 250.

NoOverlay To turn off the Satellite view, add this parameter to the
iframe source attribute: &nooverlay=true

Lat: This is the latitude at which the map centers. ( eg. 27.36)

Lng: This is the longitude at which the map centers. Default is over
Florida (eg. -77.5)

Zoom: This is the map zoom level. It defaults to 3. Range is from 1 to
17, with 17 being the most zoomed in.

Also, we've revived our serious southeast weather alert RSS feed:
http://ibis.htcreative.com/onelegged/RSS/newsfeeds.aspx?feed=alerts
And our hurricane news feed that includes all national hurricane
center discussions/outlooks and details about active storms along with
a standard hurricane-related news feed.
http://www.ibiseye.com/RSS/newsfeeds.aspx?feed=news

Comments are always welcome.

Cheers,
Mo

[CassandreRMI]

This is an amazing site and extremely useful to us. We track
hurricanes as part of our energy consulting business and wanted to add
the widget to our webpage. However, we are having problems with the
zoom function. Whether I entered zoom=1 to zoom=17, the output is the
same image. Is anyone else having problems with this function?

Thanks for your help in advance.

> a standard hurricane-related news feed.http://www.ibiseye.com/RSS/newsfeeds.aspx?feed=news

[Charlie Szymanski]

When there is an active storm, the widget tries to zoom itself in such a way
to give the best view of the storm. This overrides the hand-entered zoom
(and lat & lng) from users. We may look into changing that -- we just wanted
to give focus to storms as a default, and if the zoom is set too low or high
the storm can look very strange.

Otherwise, when there are no storms, the zoom should work fine -- though
it's hard for me to test right now.

Hope that helps,

CS

[CassandreRMI]

Thanks for your reply.

I understand the logic behind the design to override the hand-entered
zoom when there is an active storm. However,
take today's active storm, Erin... The current default zoom level of
Erin makes it difficult to figure out the location of the storm on an
initial glance as most of the land masses are cut off by the zoom.
Manually zoom one step out and you can tell the storm is approaching
Texas.

I would assume many users would be eager to view the storms in
relation to surrounding geographic points/landmasses upon first look.
I do realize one can manually zoom in and out using the + and - scale
on the picture, but it would be nice to be able to customize the
initial widget zoom settings. Please keep that in mind for the future
if it is possible.

Thanks again for reading our comments!

On Aug 15, 11:46 am, "Charlie Szymanski"

[Charlie Szymanski]

I may fiddle with the zooming after these current storms have passed (always
hesitate to make changes while storms are going on...).

Part of the problem is that it's really hard to automate the zoom level.
What it tries to do is take the path of the storm, combine it with the first
few forecast points, and draw a box around it and zoom appropriately. The
problem lies in the fact that occasionally the points are closer together,
and occasionally they are further apart. And sometimes they're over water,
and sometimes over land. It's hard to make a system that guesses
appropriately, especially when you want it zoomed in more when the storm is
approaching landfall, but want it zoomed out while over water.

As you can imagine, a lot of tweaking is involved. Right now if it's East of
a certain longitude (and thus over the open atlantic) it zooms a couple of
levels further out to make sure more of the track is visible. That system
was never put into place over the Gulf, so you see an image that is a little
too tight now.

Anyhow, it's something we'll fiddle with.