What do we think about Weather Underground's new Dashboard?

[JennyLeez]

Being a frequent visitor to member's Weather Underground websites picking up data, I have watched the new dashboard in development.

I see this morning much to my horror it has now gone live

I am finding it slow and hanging 50% of the pages.
I am finding it big, chunky and not as clear cut as the old look.
There is no This Month or This Year.
Instead there is The last Year and The last month. Meaning 10th March to 10th April (Last month) and April 2013 to April 2014. ( Last Year).
Not very helpful re our 'Data Summary' Rainfall manual collection.

I also see we have a lot of rain in the last year, an extreme amount of rain.

Arthur's Pass has had 39,792mm in the last year ...lol
Belmont 8,707mm
Port Robinson 11,994mm
Wairoa 11,212mm
Ashburton 9,014

and so it goes on.

However apparently it is well liked and the consensus is more modern looking.
What do you guys think, thats if you have not drowned in all this rain

Here is Port Robinson to give you a starter for 10
http://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=INORTHCA6

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[Derek]

Personally I quite like the new look, it has some nice features.

You can get a summary for the past calendar month (or any period you want) using the custom entry fields and picking the start and finish dates.  This probably suits most peoples interests.

The rain totals in the month summaries and such like seem to be out by a factor of about 10  - I looked at my station data (IAUCKLAN53) for March and it reports a total of 465 mm, my actual total is 49.2 mm.  The daily totals in the last column are about right, so it is something in their summation process of all those that is wrong (minor discrepancies seem normal with rainfall amounts on Wunderground as they integrate the rainfall rate over time rather than get an actual total value from the station - at least that is how they used to do it).

[PeterP]

I wonder if this is why my WU icons and forecasts have disappeared from my web page?

It was working last night but not this morning. I am not alone, BCJKIWI seems to be missing them, we both have Saratoga templates.

[David]

Pretty flash, and I really like the look of it, and the interactive graph feature is right up my alley 

Few problems I noticed: 

1) scale on the rain graph just says 0 at every value
2) it messes with the browser history so that you can't get back to the website you arrived from using the back button

Also it seems they have data problems according to you guys. Maybe they released it prematurely.

PS, anyone look at the source code? It's 17,500 lines! No wonder the page took a while to load.

[Feildingweather]

Likewise WU icons & forecasts gone Also Wu-forecast script from Saratoga..

[JennyLeez]

Mine are both still working fine.
But I am using the older script as did not like the later versions, so I guess this is why.

If you have version 1.29 or earlier try using that.

[JennyLeez]

Half an hour of tearing out my hair doing the data summary. I give up.

I have worked out if no data for the day, the page tries to load but does not. Just goes round and round and round and round and round and round ...........

Rainfall totals are all over the place. 1 of our stations had 648mm rain from 12.00 to 12.15am.
Not in the tables but as the total *shrug*

No month rainfall and no year rainfall. This means I am now going to have to carry these forward adding the day rainfall to the month and year manually .....  not happy about this.

or I can do as Derek suggests and use custom. To get the figure I want, say the month rainfall to date,  I will need to make 6 mouse clicks as opposed to the old layout which had the month rainfall right there on the main page.

Ok thats my grizzle, tail between legs I am going to bed

[itaranak18]

I really like it but it is work in progress. After it comes out of Beta we will see what the verdict is then.

[einzack]

It does seem quite clunky.
I assume that will get better as they do various updates, but initially it doesn't seem as friendly as the old way, but there are some nice features.
I'll give it a month or so and see if any further improvements are made....

[TonyC]

I'm in the Einzack camp and concur with all he said............

Not very excited about the 10 day forecast it's given me   

[Feildingweather]

Thanks but cant find an old version of the script.. Anyone else having the WU-forecast not working issue and maybe have a fix?

[gabba]

Wu are notorious for this. I'm guessing the Saratoga script scrapes the wu site so if they go and change the layout, it breaks.

Fixes are normally forthcoming pretty quickly, but be patient. We all went through a patch a couple of years ago where the script seemed to break every second week or so wile wu tinkered with the page.

[JennyLeez]

@Feildingweather. A bit of reading here also

http://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=22299.0;topicseen

[Feildingweather]

Thanks Jenny i will keep an eye on that thread 

[JennyLeez]

The many errors still have not been fixed.
The rainfall totals are all up the creek and it beats me as to why this has not been fixed.
I worked out to add 2 x decimal points but that also does not always work.
Listing the week invariably gives you the day again.
I see they have re arranged the dashboard on me today so I have to get use to where the data is that I want once again

Checking against some of our station sites the data is quite different and I am really beginning to think WU is totally unreliable especially the rainfall figures
Needless to say I am still not impressed 

Here is a bit of reading from WU members forum feedback if anyone is interested.

http://help.wunderground.com/forums/229044-pws-dashboard

[TonyC]

They've just done another mail-out to station providers, so presumably they've finished tweaking with it.
I must admit that it is quite an improvement on the old one.

TC

[gabba]

Yep - looked at it on the mobile this morning and it looked pretty good. The Satellite map was a bit all up the whop. There was an orange haze over all of the Hutt Valley, presumably because it was cloudy...but why Orange?

[TonyC]

It was orange when I looked at it this morning, but the time showed it was in the middle of the night. I've just checked it out now and it's displaying with the correct time and a normal graphic colour.

[JennyLeez]

Nope still does nothing for me 

They are going for eye candy but has the opposite effect for me.

Dont like Font, not clear.
Font too big.
Whole page too big and chunky.
Graphs too big and chunky.
Satellite map a yukky kakky yellow colour .

Thank goodness for the classic look, I sure hope they never remove it.

Just my opinion of course

[JennyLeez]

So it is a year later since I started this topic and nothing much has improved at Weather Underground. In fact in this past week it has been pretty much unusable on and off.
The pages would not load or took forever. Data was missing with all fields blank or replaced with 0.0.
Useless and frustrating.

Again I have had to use the classic view to complete the Data Summary. I mainly do anyways as 100% faster and not so clumsy for want of a better word.

Wolfie advises me they are ceasing support for the classic view having found this post :
http://classic.wunderground.com/blog/admin/comment.html?entrynum=5

Needless to say I have posted my thoughts re this at Weather Underground.
I will be giving all the WU stations to Wolfie re the Data Summary. He may have more patience than I have ... lol

I just dont get why they would take away that which runs sweet and replace with a broken mess. ( in my humble opinion of course ).

Mr Celenza referring to the 'new design':

I want to assure you that we are committed to providing you with the most accurate, local, and up-to-date weather data.

Mr Celenza, just data would be great 

Anyways that is my rant for today, onwards and upwards

Cheers