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Noticed Some Changes Lately?

Last week I tweaked the color scheme to match the forecast icons. We’re keeping with the sky/water/sand theme only now just a bit brighter and more coherent.

Today, I removed the weather history icons that lived beneath the current conditions. Nobody was clicking on them. The images accounted for about 1/3rd of the data necessary to load the home page. That wasn’t a good tradeoff between useful information and bandwidth consumption. I’m always mindful that people have limited data on their mobile plans. Speed is another concern too.

I also moved the dropdown selector that was in the conditions section to the page settings (gear wheel icon in the upper right of home page). That’s where it belongs rather than cluttering up the current conditions. If you need to change the frequency of updates, it’s just one click to get there. Again, the data shows that few people adjust that setting, so why not put it where power users naturally go anyway?

One more tiny detail. I added the time zone to the conditions and forecast update times. When visitors travel, they shouldn’t have to wonder if the times listed are local time or Marquette time. The forecast will always be updated in Eastern time. The conditions will be updated according to the current time zone selected on your computer or mobile device. In Marquette, they should both show “EST” or “EDT” depending on Daylight Saving Time.

Also, I should mention that we recently changed hosts about 3 weeks ago. Regular, long-time visitors may remember some extended outages lasting hours, even days in one instance last year due to some lackluster planning by our old host, A2hosting. I picked out another Michigan hosting company, Liquid Web.  Not only do they own their data center in Lansing (rare), but their operation is prepared to withstand power & internet failures, weather events, and DDOS attacks (coordinated hacking) among other unfortunate events. That’s not to say the site will never go offline, but, hopefully, not as frequently or for as long. It’s much more expensive to host with them, but their speed and reliability so far have been phenomenal.

Well, thanks for visiting. If you enjoy the site, please tell your friends & family!

Demolish Marquette to Improve Forecasts?

Would forecasts improve if we removed all the buildings, ripped out all the concrete and moved everyone to tents situated along Lakeshore Blvd? Short answer: likely.

Too often the forecasted high temperatures for Marquette run well below the measured high temperatures, especially on sunny days when the wind isn’t blowing off the lake. This is true of all forecast agencies I’ve observed to one degree or another. It just so happens the local National Weather Service, our forecast provider, is also guilty of this trend. Continue reading “Demolish Marquette to Improve Forecasts?”

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