Mission complete! Also, fortunately, there was a missing icon because of a fairly gusty forecast this week. Sure enough, that's the kind of icon I needed several weeks ago.
Wim, your instructions were simple enough, even for me. But even after deleting the NOAA forecast text file and (supposedly) emptying the (two different) browser's cache, I was still getting the "?" indication. I think it was simply that your scripts don't check/read the NOAA text file if the 'time delay' ($cacheTime) has not run out. In any case, ~300 seconds after uploading the edited Warning.php file, up came the 'wind sock' icon!
Now I'm going to RE-download the stand alone Forecast and Warning templates to see what values you had suggested. I have three different times; noaaPlainGenerateHtml.php: 3600 seconds (1 hour), noaaDigitalGenerateHtml.php: 7200 seconds, noaaWarning.php: 300 seconds comment="advised by noaa nws.eu"
I can understand that Warnings can change quite quickly and 5 minutes should help prevent everyone contacting NOAA too often.
Not sure why the Forecasts (Plain & Digital) use two different times. Seems like 1 hour should be suitable. BTW, I'm assuming that these times are started based on the first time the script ever runs. Then ever 1 or 2 hours after that.
The cache time starts when a file is read from NOAA and the copy in the cache is to old.
So when there was no visitor in lets say 24 hours, the 3 files are read / processed and intermediate results are stored in the cache.
01:00 am: Last visit and all files in the cache are valid when page is in the browser
10:00 am: Second visitor arrives and all three files are read again because 9 hours is longer then allowed cached time, all three files are stored in the cache with timestamp 10:00:??
10:01 am: Visitor request a fresh page, all data comes from cache as all files are just 1 minute old
10:06 am: Visitor request a fresh page, warnings are read from NOAA as they are older then allowed cache time of 5 minutes
11:10 am: Visitor request a fresh page, warnings (more then 5 minutes old) and plain forecast (> 1 hour) are read from NOAA.
Last question: Why plain forecast 1 hour and Digital forecast 2 hours?
Plain forecast is a "nearly html.page " type request such as "give me the forecast for New-york". All people asking this forecast will get the exact same file returned
Digitial forecast is a very heavy request involving 100's maybe 1000's access by NOAA to gather the information. It is tailored to your wishes.
This is the request screen:
http://graphical.weather.gov/xml/SOAP_server/ndfdXML.htmNo two persons will request the same information, no caching possible at the NOAA site then.
The returned file is LARGE and complex with different (1 hour and 3 hour and other) time-periods for different weather items. All data must be converted to a standard time period.
To lower the load on NOAA and on your webserver the cache time is set higher.
Also the cache times are not set exactly the same to spread the load during the day.
There is no data loaded from NOAA when there is no visitor at your site. That is why the first visitors ( as all files are to old) response time in the morning is longer then subsequent visits.
Wim