Let me know please what are de correct steps to have my graph with the right location when my run is not in the usual city.
Should I change Location at my Slowgeek profile BEFORE I upload my workout on itunes?
I've noticed that when i do this change, several of my past run graphs automatically change their location too....
No, don't do that. On your runs page (/ru) down in the table click on the weather station for the run and enter it. As you know, I am in Madrid right now, so I entered "LEMD" there for my recent runs. You can go through a quickly change many runs that way, then click on one of your changed runs to verify that it picked up the location correctly.
There is a very basic weather station finder here: http://slowgeek.com/wstation.php
I haven't had the energy to integrate it yet. It tries to guess where you are by your ip initially, but you can of course just delete that and type in any location and it tries to match that against other users. It tries to be smart about it as well. You can enter something like "Central Park" and it will guess you might be in New York.
Mr. Lerdorf, you are great !!! 
What if there is no weather station nerarby my place ?, how can I locate my run ?:
It doesn't work for me. Every Wednesday I run at a location different from my default location and I set my weather station to match. All my runs still show at my default location.
ATJ777, that's because there is nobody else at that location. There is no way to go from a personal weather station to a location. For larger weather stations that people have listed as their local weather station, I can extract the location from that. Go take a run in Sydney, for example, and it will work fine when you put in YSSY.
Jovisaru, just zoom out a bit in your head and pick the closest weather station. The only reason the location is interesting is because of the weather data. If there is no weather station, there is no weather data anyway. Then just note the location of the run in the run comment. You can click on that as well on the run table and edit it there.
The weather station itself has a location. My usual weather station is INSWBLAX5 and it lists its location as: Blaxland Sth NSW Australia. The XML file for the daily observations also has the location.
The weather station I use on Wednesdays: INSWWEST4 also lists its location: West Pennant Hills, Sydney, NSW and that's in the daily observations XML file.
Thank you very much rlerdorf for your comments. I will for sure take your advice and I will zoom out a bit in my head.
ATJ777, no, none of the XML files carry any location data, unfortunately. The XML file for your weather station from Tuesday, looks like this, for example:
http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=INSWBLAX5&month=04&day=14&year=2010&format=l
The top of that file says:
Time,TemperatureC,DewpointC,PressurehPa,WindDirection,WindDirectionDegrees,WindSpeedKMH,WindSpeedGustKMH,Humidity,HourlyPrecipMM,Conditions,Clouds,dailyrainCM,SoftwareType
2010-04-14 07:04:00,8.3,7.8,1005.0,North,0,0.0,0.0,97,0.0,,,0.0,Cumulus v1.8.9,
2010-04-14 07:19:00,9.3,8.8,1005.3,NW,315,1.6,1.6,97,0.0,,,0.0,Cumulus v1.8.9,
There is nothing there that says anything about a location. The only way to get it would be to crawl the weather station page HTML, which is possible, but a royal pain in the ass because it isn't consistent across the different types of weather stations and is bound to break on any small layout change.
I was looking at this file:
http://api.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=INSWWEST4&format=XML
Unfortunately only some of the weather stations have the full alternate XML info like that.
I'm a little confused how you can get accurate location information based on people listing a local weather station.
I'll use Sydney as an example. Sydney is a big place with hundreds of suburbs. Maybe 50 people use YSSY as their local weather station. However, those 50 people might be in different locations within Sydney, e.g. Bondi, Chatswood, Beverly Hills, Hornsby, Castle Hill, etc. How do you know which person's location to use? How do you know that the person has even chosen the correct lodal weather station?
As another example. I live in Glenbrook but the closest weather station to me is in Blaxland (next town over). If there was a person in Blaxland who uses the same weather station, would their location show as Glenbrook - assuming you look up who uses that weather station, find me, and use my location. By the way, my home runs now show as in Blaxland rather than Glenbrook.
Most people don't actually want their location to be all that accurate for privacy reasons. Like you said, Sydney is a big city, so telling someone you are running in Sydney is a pretty safe thing to do. And the weather, in most places, including Sydney, doesn't change much from one suburb to the next. Also, the local personal weather stations for the most part do not have any condition data, so using the large airport-based weather stations tend to give more interesting data anyway instead of trying to pick the weather station that is as close as possible to your run.
And yes, I added Blaxland as the location for the Blaxland weather station.
>And the weather, in most places, including Sydney, doesn't change much from one suburb to the next.
I can't speak for other cities, but there is a very wide variation in conditions across Sydney at any one point in time. Temperature variation of up to 5ºC (9ºF) is not uncommon and sometimes a lot more than that. Humidity also varies a lot.
This is the reason I try to pick a weather station as close as possible to my run and I have seen quite large differences from one weather station to the next.
Anyway, I have far less concerned about the location displaying as it is only a nice to have.
I see having accurate weather information as being much more important and sadly I no longer get that.
I get quite badly affected by heat and even 5ºC can make a difference to my runs. For example, a couple of weeks ago I ran a PB by over 30 seconds for a 7km run because it was 14ºC rather than 24ºC 2 weeks earlier.
My run on Wednesday says it was 19ºC when it was actually around 25ºC. The previous week it was 23ºC yet on Slow Geek it shows as 13.6ºC. I have no idea where those temperatures came from, certainly not the specified weather station.
By the way, here's a sample of temperatures from a few Sydney weather stations for around 2:45pm today.
INSWWEST4 14:43 26.2
INSWPOTT2 14:46 24.3
INSWAMBA 14:50 31.4
INSWKIRR2 14:39 26.4
YSSY 14:30 27.0
Variation of nearly 7ºC. I also saw that YSSY appears to only temperature readings every 30 minutes.
Sure, but you also have to wonder how much of that is variance in the quality of these personal weather stations themselves. I have 3 near my house in California that will often show a variance of 5 degrees even though there is definitely no temperature difference that large between these weather stations that are less than a km from each other. The local military/Lockheed-Martin airfield data only samples every 30 minutes as well, but it seems much more accurate to me and it includes condition data. Anybody can install a PWS using whatever random hardware they can pick up and register it. There is no quality control on these things.
Here's data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology: http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/nsw/observations/sydney.shtml which shows similar variations in temperature.
As I said before, Sydney is a large city and the weather conditions vary quite a lot, especially between the coast and the inland suburbs, and also between the hills and the plains.
That still doesn't say anything about the quality of these various personal weather stations. You can have a 5 degree variance based simply on where and how you install it in your backyard. I still prefer the professionally managed airport-based ones, but you are of course free to enter any weather station you like.
So rlerdorf, you have changed your default location while you are in Brazil but You told me not to locate runs this way....
Any problems with local Weather Station or is that you have turned Brazilian theses days :-).
"On your runs page (/ru) down in the table click on the weather station for the run and enter it. " I have been trying to do this. However, although I can highlight the weather station, I can't type anything over it. Please advise.
You have to be logged in to change it. There is a little weather station helper app that I still haven't integrated available at http://slowgeek.com/wstation.php.
Thanks. Logging in did the trick.
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