Saturday, December 13, 2014

Real-Time Websites

I got up this morning and went skiing up at Snowbird. It has been a while since we have gotten any new snow so I was glad to look on their website and see we had 4 inches of it overnight. My wife and I had a good morning of skiing while it continued snowing and then we came home. I was eager to see how much snow fell while we were skiing. Imagine my surprise when Snowbird's website still registered the same 4 inches. I kept checking throughout the day as it continued snowing only to see the same number.

Snowbird is not the only website that has a problem keeping their website updated. I was trying to get real-time weather reports this last Thursday as the San Francisco area was pounded with a storm. All I wanted was a live picture of the marina where I keep my sailboat. The yacht club located in the marina claimed to have a webcam pointed in the general direction of my boat. Unfortunately I couldn't find the page with live pictures. They did have an automated feed of the anemometer in the marina so I could see the strength of the wind. That let me know that my boat was fine.

The secret to having a real-time website is not having to manually update it. There needs to be some sort of automatic feed to keep the website up to date with the latest information. Something like an anemometer or web camera. I think the people responsible to input the latest snow totals were out skiing instead of doing their job. I can't say I blame them though. I would be too.

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