Stella-Maris - Broadstairs - Star of the Sea

Picture of Broadstairs

Although the pandemic is officially over Covid has not gone away so some events may still get cancelled or curtailed so please make sure you contact the event organisers before making any plans for 2024 especially if travelling from afar!

If you do visit please respect our Town and please leave nothing but footprints in the sand when you depart.

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 then 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 Krystal.

The website has had a complete re-write in order to convert to HTML5 standard. 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! One other thing I have done is to re-format the menu to hopefully improve the experience for tablet/phone users, this may change again as I find a better technique.

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 will produce a warning but others may not.

Since the advent of Social Media some things I used to do are no longer worth doing so I have removed some pages like the Eat & Drink, Where to Stay and Shopping pages.

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 my wife as a Christmas present.

The first station was 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 did not have that sensor.

Sadly after sone 15 years the Davis station has failed and been retired. I now have a new station which is an Ecowitt GW1003 which does everything the old one did and with UV and lightning as well.

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. There is also another excellent site which is good for information on a wide range of weather topics including hardware and software called WXForum run by Ken True, and it has quite a lot of information about the Ecowitt stations and others.

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