My main obsession is to find the best location to go surfing as often as possible - but this depends on lots of things - mostly the weather. Getting bored at Christmas I made an analogue calculator made of three layers of cardboard which rotate on top of each other with a map on the top and the surfing spots that are good go green when you line them up just right and show where the surf is good. The inputs are the wind direction and the swell direction. Its works very well and I have had some great experiences surfing alone in perfect surf in the South West of the UK ever since. I decided to make a computer programme to replicate this using Processing (very steep learning curve) and get the inputs from the University of Hawaii and the Seven Stones Lightship. The innovative thing is that I am doing an analogue calculation using bit-maps of the three layers which I rotate in response to the data I get by reading a couple of URL's in the programme - which I think is quite cool. Anyway it works really well, I've been using it for months and now I always know where to go to get some waves. :).

Next step, I thought it would be nice to put this on the web for fellow obsessives in the UK as there are plenty of waves if you know where to look.

So the issue I have is how can I create a web-site that reads from a couple of public data sources, does some simple parsing of the feeds to get the swell and wind direction and then rotates two images and then shows a map of where the surf is good. I'd rather like to host it on AWS because I really like their approach - another steep learning curve for me.

So - after all that ramble, all I want to store is two numbers (swell and wind angle) and then pass them to my programme to display a picture in a web page

Happy to share the source code - but only if you don't laugh at an old FORTRAN programmer's feeble efforts to get up to speed with all the amazing stuff happening today.