The IEM homepage features the "IEM Daily Feature", which attempts to highlight something interesting and relevant to current weather and climate. Users are given the option to anonymously vote good, bad, or abstain to the most recent feature! A simple HTTP cookie is set to prevent voting more than once (yes this can easily be defeated for some motivated user...).

Anyway, I sometimes get questions as to why there are so many bad and abstain votes each day. Outside of people actually voting that way, there were likely two other reasons that accounted for most of those votes:

• Website search engine crawlers would follow the link and register votes
• Users would mistakenly bookmark the homepage that had the voting indication hard coded into the web address

So I have modified the voting code and am using javascript and a background HTTP call to do the voting. This should mostly stop the votes that are coming from the issues listed above.

To date, 3,186 IEM Daily Features have been written. While these features are neat, a long term frustration of mine is that they are almost always an "one-off". This means that the plots were created via some local script that is not available for dynamic plotting on the website. Rewording, you can search and search on the website but rarely find an application that can generate that same chart.

Going forward, I intend to change this practice. You may have noticed little buttons recently appearing underneath the featured chart/map.

Generate This Chart on Website

Clicking this button should take you to an application that generated the featured image and contains options to change the plot to another location or plot other variables.

Not all IEM Daily Features will have this functionality as some plotting scripts take many minutes or hours to run, so they are not conducive to interactive web plotting. The hope is that these will be few and far in-between.

Many times I'll produce a graphic for Des Moines or Ames and folks will instantly wonder what that chart looks like for Waterloo or some other location in the MidWest. This new functionality should help immediately address that need.

As always, please let me know of suggestions.