The Mineral, Virginia weather camera is back!

EDIT: Direct link to the webcam: https://www.johndball.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/weatherimage.jpg

Weather Underground announced on 15 November 2017 that they would be shutting down the Weather Camera functionality on Weather Underground. This was the second “coolest” feature of Weather Underground (the first being running your own weather station).
REF: http://help.wunderground.com/knowledgebase/articles/1821811?sp_rid=MjMzOTc4MjU0MDg4S0&sp_mid=12367650

After the announcement was made I quickly began building a secure-ish alternative solution to allow the public to view the weather camera from Mineral, Virginia South side without allowing direct access to the webcam from the Internet (that’s a big red flag and a sure-fire way to get hacked).

It’s a little technical but the gist: upload the Foscam FTP images to a Linux FTP server, rename the images to a standardized format, and display the images on a Linux web server (here on WordPress) all through a bash script. The script runs every sixty seconds using crontab and delivers a “fresh” image at least once a minute and a most every two minutes.

From a technical standpoint it did take a little engineering (see my related post for the script details). From a security standpoint this is a huge security win because it does not involve passing public connections from the internet directly to the webcam.

With that said, you can view the weather camera images for Mineral, Virginia South side in the following URL (save it to your mobile bookmarks) or use the Weather category drop down: https://www.johndball.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/weatherimage.jpg

Side note: if you want quick access from your Apple iPhone, visit the link above in Safari, click the box with the “up” arrow to bookmark the web page, then select the icon “Add to Home Screen”.

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