No, we cannot control the weather. But we can control how weather information we receive is displayed on our site.
To give you a new and improved experience, our home page weather display now features information fed to us by the WeatherUnderground (wunderground.com).
What’s the same?
As usual, the default weather setting is for La Grande, the location of the EONI offices. And our servers will still remember your location if you changed it as a myEONI default, provided that you are still using the same computer and have not explicitly cleared or disabled your cookies. (When you select an alternate location for viewing the weather, an anonymous random cookie is set on your computer which is compared to the cookie serial number on our server, as explained in a following paragraph.)
What’s different?
Aside from the appearance of the weather display icon on the home page, when you click the icon or the link for “Click for Weather Forecast”, you now will go to the detailed WeatherUnderground page for that location. This WeatherUnderground page gives you much detail and many features — all one click away from the EONI home page — such as:
- hourly, 5-day and 10-day forecasts
- update timing; how long ago data was posted
- ability to add “favorites” as page-top tabs to other locations you might choose
- alternate access to nearby airports and nearby weather stations’ data
- webcams, radar and satellite maps
- choice of weather data source (NWS or BestForecast)
- sports and event information for your selected location
- historical records of low temperatures for current day
- video links to subjects of interest to gardeners, farmers, skiers, travelers, history buffs, meteorology enthusiasts and others
Why did we change?
For many years EONI has run a dedicated server to provide the current conditions weather graphic for our web site and local forecasts. The software we have been using was last updated about 30 months ago. Our server software retrieves the data from the National Weather Service. In the past couple of months the National Weather Service updated their web site and format for their weather data. This caused our server to no longer be able to find the information and present it to our web site visitors. After searching for other software and finding none…we chose to use Weather Underground to provide our weather. EONI was proud to offer an advertising free weather web site. We felt we should focus on providing better Internet, phone, email and hosting services and let weather be handled by people who specialize in this.
COOKIES AND YOUR PRIVACY
Cookies are commonly used on Web sites throughout the Internet to aid in navigation, and to “remember” your visits. Cookies can be very useful and helpful, but we believe that they are inappropriate if they are used without your knowledge to gather information about you and your use of the Internet.
The myEONI options require that you have a cookies-capable browser, with cookies enabled. Cookies are used by myEONI to identify your specified preferences whenever you enter our Web site using the browser and computer you first used to set your preferences. We gather absolutely NO personal information about you or your computing environment. Instead, when you set your myEONI preferences, our server automatically assigns you an anonymous, randomly-generated number that is simply matched against the database of all myEONI preferences. This is never used — and has no usefulness in any other way — except when you revisit our site with your browser and computer. Thus, your privacy is assured, yet you are afforded the convenience of home page content selected by you personally.
