Web page help... Tides

[DavidGrieves]

Hi
Not strictly a boating question but does anybody know if it is possible to get tide times, for say Liverpool to display directly onto a web page, eg get the HTML script and put that on the club page so it displays that days tide times?

Thanks for any help.

Dave

 

[SwedishLass]

I use the easytide from UKHO, Select the port first and paste in link.
eg Gladstone Dock
http://easytide.ukho.gov.uk/EasyTide/EasyTide/SelectPrediction.aspx?PortID=0451

What you need is a web query for the specific data. As you have probably noticed UKHO is very protective of the data we pay for.

 

[shmoo]

I did this http://www.woodbridgecruisingclub.co.uk/tidesaugoct07.html for the WCC web site. What I did was this: extract textual daily data from WXtide 32 for Felixstowe. Wrote a program to parse the textual data and add the corrections from Reeds for the right time of day, then put it out to HTML. If you could manage that, or know someone who can I will let you have the source code.

 

[ggt9]

It's not hard to display daily tide times or other dynamic data on a web page and there's lots of ways to do it.

It's a bit harder to get permission to do so... UKHO is protective of its predictions and I'm aware of several websites that used to display tide tables that were asked politely to stop. I don't see why you can't do your own predictions (e.g. with standalone software) but I'd be wary of reproducing anybody else's existing tide tables.

If you want to talk to UKHO, a good place to start is here

When I tried this in the past, they were happy to arrange a licence for a reasonable fee and to provide annual data in an easy to use text file format but it does depend on your intended use and the amount of data you wish to display... today's tides will cost less than making a full year's worth available and they may let you to do it for free.

Many people seem just to provide a link to Easytide instead.

If you do go ahead, one tip we came up with was to make sure to include the date as part of the text that is dynamically updated. That way, if something breaks and the site doesn't get updated for a few days, it's not left showing the wrong time of high tide and no-one is left stuck on a sandbank /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif