I'd very much like to set up some shortcuts to the Current Meteorology
products in a similar
way that some others have done for Europe and Australia, for the regions and
locations that I most frequently access. If you'll allow this, do you have
any documentation available on the CGI parameters, etc?
We do not allow this capability anymore because in the past, our website had an
exponentially increasing number of automated requests for the meteogram and other
programs in READY and we found that these requests were coming at a rate of several
requests per second by a few users all day long. This overwhelmed our system and
caused many response problems for our regular customers. The decision was made
to either remove the meteogram from the web or make it so that only users going
through the READY menus can access it. The latter was decided. Although it will
make it somewhat harder for you to access now, you also now have the ability to
define a location once and request all READY products for that location without
having to reenter the source each time.
Other reasons we do not favor this direct access include:
1. If we make changes that involve the inputs to the
CGI script, then those pages that link directly cause many problems for
our server with bad requests. This has slowed our server considerably
in the past.
2. It causes the user to not see the main pages of READY to be alerted
to changes or outages that we may have.
3. This type of access tends to multiply quickly with every local
home page having direct links to our perl scripts, further slowing
down our system. It also proliferates the concept of using other's
work without acknowledgement.
So, the short answer is no we cannot provide the inputs to the
CGI scripts and no we do not allow access in this way.