A Personal Perspective on Broadstairs

About Stella-Maris.org.uk

About the Website

I worked in the IT world taking early retirement in 2002 after nearly 37 years of commuting as well as computing!. It was really great not to have to survive travelling either round the M25 or on those horrible old slam door trains to London.

I started this website, as broadstairs.org, just after we moved here and it has grown since that time become what it is now as stella-maris.org.uk. By the way both domains are still owned by me and both end up taking you to this current website.

Initially the site was hosted in the free space that came from my ISP, but more recently it not only became too large but also required other features to ease the maintenance of the site so it is now hosted. It runs on a Linux/Apache server with Ariotek.

The website has just had a complete re-write in order to do a couple of things. First I needed to clean up the actual HTML to meet the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard, and second I wanted to move to using Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS) to do all the formatting. The only page on the site which does not meet these criteria is the Guestbook, although it has been considerably cleaned up. I have also corrected most of my lousy spelling and typing mistakes!

The site does require that you have Javascript enabled on your web browser in order for quite a number of things to work correctly. Some things like the Weather Display Live and Mesomap Live pages will produce a warning, but other more minor features may not.

I now try to keep up to date with all the major events happening in Broadstairs and the Isle of Thanet but often have to rely on the organisers letting me know what's happening. So the listing is not as comprehensive as I'd like, but that's life.

About the Weather Station

I've always had more than a passing interest in weather but only after I retired was I lucky enough to be given a weather station by Janie as a Christmas present.

The station is a Davis Vantage Pro which measures wind speed, wind direction, external & internal temperature, external & internal humidity, barometric pressure and global solar irradiance (which is used to measure sunshine hours). It is also capable of measuring UV radiation but I do not have that sensor.

The weather station console is connected to a PC, this runs an excellent software package called Weather Display which is written by a New Zealander called Brian Hamilton. Brian provides the best support I have ever come across in the world of software and his program comes highly recommended by the 1000's of users worldwide. There is an excellent support forum which can be accessed here.