N3KL Solar Activity Monitor without images Page updated November 18, 2011
Solar X-Rays: Normal Quiet
Some new site redesign work has prompted me to revisit the text-based Solar Activity Monitor. This page is a demonstration of how solar activity data can be included in the page title, in headers from level h1 through h6, paragraphs and other textual structures in a Web page, and more, if it is made available in text form. Additionally, screen readers now read something other than "Image" titled, "Status."
I have overhauled the code used to embed the Monitor after I found that the code I had offered for everyone to use broke when I put it into this new site style. And while I was at it, I set up a new embed page that is a lot neater than what was offered before.
Effective with this page update, I have also updated the stylesheet in the embedded page . It is now self-centering regardless of the width of its containment vessels, which are the "object" or "iframe" in the code provided below for insertion on your site.
Let's see it in action!
And here is the new code to show it on YOUR site:
Place your cursor in the code box, then select-all, and copy.
If you want, you can run this code from a Tryit Editor at www.w3schools.com . Just replace the text found there between the <body> and </body> tags in the left pane code box and click the button above the code box.
Place this code in your Web document inside of a table cell, if you use tables for positioning the contents of your page, or inside of a div or directly inside of the body.
The width of the container div is set to 324 pixels with the code "<div style="width:324px;" and the div is further styled with a thin dotted border. It centers itself inside of your chosen container.
The embedded page is dimensioned to a width of 320 pixels with the "width="320"" in both the iframe and the object. A setting here too narrow will cause a horizontal scroll bar to appear. The display centers itself horizontally within this dimension.
The height of the display is set to 130 pixels in each of the iframe and object with the code "height="130"" with no height set in the div style. a too-small value for height will cause a vertical scroll bar to appear. Extra height will make for more white space below the display inside of the border.
If you are replacing an earlier Solar Monitor installation, please note:
To avoid duplicate headings and links, please remove all references to the N3KL Solar Monitor, Solar X-Rays and Geomagnetic Field, together with all links to n3kl.org and wb7tjd.org with the removal of the old Solar onitor code. The newly embedded page has all of these features included.
Internet Explorer 7 and earlier relies on iframe
This code snippet relies on the use of conditional comments to feed standards-capable browsers the Object tag, while hiding it from the less-capable Internet Explorer 7 and earlier versions. I am assuming Internet Explorer 8 is compliant, and thus it and later versions see the object tag.
While on this topic of comment tags, I learned to be aware of a quirk in MSIE 7's handling of conditional comments .
The object tag is used by all compliant browsers as was intended by the Web Standards committee. The embedded page will display, or if for some reason the page is missing, a paragraph will display a link to the embedded data.
Some related links
Another Solar Activity page -- NB6Z - Propagation Tools - Updated link April 1, 2010
See also -- Solar Monitor Summary on The WB7TJD Wiki - Added link April 1, 2010
How the Solar Activity Monitor Works
Below are the details, posted since 2007 on this page, about the way the system works, and what the symbols mean.
By Larry Kuck, WB7CRK (now WB7C)
This site reports the N3KL Solar Activity Monitor in text format, since August 3, 2006.
This page is updated from www.n3kl.org as of no more than three minutes ago. It provides Solar Activity status in text format rather than images, for greater accessibility to people with visual handicaps. For the first time, screen readers will render the status for the blind. The text can be zoomed on your browser, with Netscape and Firefox having greater zoom capability than Internet Explorer 6 with its five settings ranging from smallest to largest .
This page contains no HTML color formatting. All colors, including the status reports are declared in the style sheets. If need be, Internet Explorer users may choose to ignore colors, font styles or font sizes, specified on Web pages by going to Tools > Internet Options > General tab > Accessibility button. Firefox users may simply turn off page styles on the View menu.
I have used some suggestions from "ChrisHunt" and "PaulTEG," members of the CGI programming discussion forum at www.tek-tips.com, and hereby credit them with getting me started.
Not too technical
NOAA solar observation data is gathered by the N3KL web site, and the site offers to the world its N3KL Solar Monitor. The typical Solar Monitor displays two word-images which are updated every ten minutes. These images are displayed fresh from N3KL's web site each time a page containing the Solar Monitor is loaded onto the visitor's screen.
A script program that I wrote in August 2006, is triggered each time a page on this site is loaded, and it checks to see if it has run within the past three minutes. If not, it launches a Web browser that visits n3kl.org and obtains the Solar X-Ray image. The image is examined at Byte 114, which I have determined contains a unique number in each of the images sent out from the n3kl Web site.
The script matches the byte value against a list of values and prints the corresponding word or phrase to a text file on the hard drive. It then launches another Web browser and retrieves the Geomagnet field image and does the same thing with it.
In addition to the plain-text language, the script also writes to disk an HTML snippet that contains a set of <span> tags surrounding the status language, with an appropriate style sheet call. When all the dust settles, there will be four files written to disk, two each in plain text and two in rich text.
Now how is it that you can see Solar Monitor Status in search engine results for this page? Quite simply put: The power of Server Side Includes is at work on this site. I merely call for the two plain-text files to appear in the page title, and the search engine uses the page title as the hot link to this site.
I then use the two HTML snippets within an <h2> header at the top of this page. If you view the page source, you don't see the server instructions that I put in the page, just the end results.
Frequency of Solar Monitor updates
(Only the heading was changed October 15, 2011.)
Oh, and why a three-minute check? The script checks to see if it has run in the last three minutes so I can feel comfortable in running the script on every page in the site without overtaxing the bandwidth resources of n3kl.org if, say, this site got very busy and started seeing hundreds of hits per day. It will only update once every three minutes even if the script is being run once every second. This is just being a good neighbor.
Therefore, the information may be fresh from the source, or was obtained no more than three minutes ago.
Updated Sunday, February 04, 2007 with a new style and some rewrites.
Solar X-Ray Status markers and what they mean
From the pages of www.n3kl.org
Presented below are the solar X-Ray status markers, as they will appear on this site, and their meanings, lifted from http://www.n3kl.org/sun/status.html :
About the Solar X-Ray Status Monitor
The X-ray Solar status monitor downloads data periodically from the NOAA Space Environment Center FTP server. The previous 24 hours of 5 minute Long-wavelength X-ray data from each satellite (GOES 8 and GOES 10) is analyzed, and an appropriate level of activity for the past 24 hours is assigned as follows
(Definition: The reference, "1.00e-6 W/m^2" means "1 times 10 raised to the -6th power watts per square meter," or one microwatt per square meter of intensity.)
About the Geomagnetic Field Status Monitor
The Geomagnetic Field status monitor downloads data periodically from the NOAA Space Environment Center FTP server. The previous 24 hours of 3 hour Planetary Kp Index data is analyzed and an appropriate level of activity for the past 24 hours is assigned as follows:
(Definition: Kp refers to Kp INDEX. A 3-hourly planetary geomagnetic index of activity generated in Gottingen, Germany, based on the K INDEX from 12 or 13 stations distributed around the world from http://www.sec.noaa.gov/info/glossary.html )
Quiet Quiet: the Geomagnetic Field is quiet (Kp < 4)
Unsettled Unsettled: the Geomagnetic Field has been unsettled (Kp=4)
STORM! Storm: A Geomagnetic Storm has occurred (Kp>4)
There was a Mega Flare event in October 2003
I still have an article on the server, Unprecedented Solar Flares, from October 2003, telling of the time when I witnessed unprecedented solar activity. There is also more information about the N3KL Solar Activity Monitor there.
