About SeawayCity.com

SeawayCity.com is a non-commercial website originating from the Seaway City, Cornwall, Ontario, Canada. It serves its online communities as a comprehensive web portal that provides extensive weather information for Cornwall Ontario, the Seaway Valley, and Eastern Ontario.

There are also many links to a variety of local, regional, national, and international news organizations. There are links to websites that provide access to major and local team sports and access to many forms of entertainment.

The web portal has links that allow you to quickly do searches, provide you with access to provincial lotteries, quick login access to all the major Canadian financial institutions, and access to many local, provincial, and national Canadian and American government agencies.

There are links to major retail and shipping sites, travel sites, fun sites for kids, educational sites, and quick access for bill payments to the major utilities operating in or near the Seaway City in Eastern Ontario. IT’S ALL HERE!

If you know of a website that would be a good fit for SeawayCity.com and others alike, please send us a link request.

History

Inception

SeawayCity.com was founded in 2009. The domain names seawaycity.com and seawaycity.ca were both registered on February 24, 2009 with the .com and .ca top-level domain registries. The domain seawaycity.com is the primary domain, with seawaycity.ca serving as a permanent redirect to it.

Shortly after registration, SeawayCity.com quickly went online and since then, has always been hosted with DataCom Network Services which also operates from the Seaway City in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada.

Design

Original

The original look and feel for SeawayCity.com originated with DataCom which began operating in Cornwall, Ontario as DataCom Bulletin Board Services in 1984. Beginning in 1990, DataCom Online Services was offering internet dial-up services to Cornwall and area. In 2010 the company incorporated as DataCom Network Services Inc. and as seen here, its website mainly served as an online portal for its customers to access a variety of internet online services.

Static

The SeawayCity.com website was originally designed and launched in 2009. Although the framework for the website remained virtually unchanged for more than a decade, minor changes were made from time to time.

The static, one-page design proved to be problematic and constraining when it came time to make any changes. For the most part, we made very little of them.

CMS

Already familiar with the major content management systems (CMS), like Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, and Wix, SeawayCity.com opted to use WordPress, which currently powers more than one-third of all websites on the internet.

While preserving much of the look and feel of the old site, we were able to successfully integrate our existing weather engine to work with WordPress. We are excited to now have the ability to more easily bring you new content that we hope you will enjoy throughout the years to come.

Features

Scenes

Throughout the years, SeawayCity.com has displayed beautiful Seaway Valley scenes, masterly photographed by Dean Ducas of Cornwall.

For more than a decade, Dean’s photography could be seen displayed, albeit constrained at 978 pixels, behind the SeawayCity.com logo at the top of the website, called the header.

Great care has been taken to display only local Seaway Valley scenes. Today, each is predominantly displayed in high resolution in an animated slider that sits on the website’s top content area, making Dean’s photography one of several featured elements on the SeawayCity.com Web Portal.

Weather

The weather is a primary feature that draws visitors to SeawayCity.com. It consists of five parts, and all of them are equally important. They are the “current conditions”, the “forecast”, the “detailed forecast”, the “Air Quality Health Index”, and the “Ontario radar”.

Current conditions

Our current conditions feature offers a comprehensive set of active weather data points. They are wind direction, wind velocity, wind gust, wind chill (winter), heat index (summer), humidity, dew point, pressure, pressure tendency, visibility, an observation of the sky, and if any, the form of precipitation.

It is made available to us, courtesy of the National Weather Service (NWS), which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Their mission is the protection of life and property and the enhancement of their national economy.

The NWS aggregates the data they receive from thousands of meteorology instruments located at airports throughout Canada and the United States, and provides us with the information.

Our customized software converts it to metric, renders the data received into legible text, using a variety of fonts and colours, lines them up with our custom set of life-like weather icons, and then feeds the end result into our content management system (CMS) which is powered by DataCom’s web server, for all our weather enthusiasts to see when they come visit.

Forecast

The data points for our 5-day graphical forecast, and our 7-day detailed text forecast are provided by Environment Canada (EC). Updates are received four and sometimes, five times per day. Our software seamlessly handles the day/night transitions based on our timezone, and again, here it goes through the same process as with the current conditions. Only the source, (EC instead of NWS), is the primary difference.

The Detailed Weather Forecast will also display extreme weather advisories when issued by Environment Canada for Cornwall and the Seaway Valley.

 

 

Air quality health index

Beginning in March 2023, Canada was affected by a record-setting series of wildfires which caused unprecedented levels of smoke, forcing air quality alerts and evacuations in Canada and the United States. SeawayCity.com now includes a link to the Air Quality Health Index which is made available by Environment Canada.

Ontario radar

One of our most colourful features on SeawayCity.com can, at times, be the Ontario weather radar. Here in the office, we refer to it as “NEXRAD”, which stands for Next-Generation Radar, a network of 160 high-resolution S-band Doppler weather radars operated by the NWS. The technical name is WSR-88D (Weather Surveillance Radar, 1988, Doppler). The radar images seen on SeawayCity.com are provided by Accuweather.com.

The Ontario radar seen below was in its full glory when captured on March 10, 2021. As rarely seen, here we have a mix of all the forms of precipitation with their varying degrees of intensity.

The colour bar depicts the various forms of precipitation (rain, snow, ice, mix), each with four levels of intensity.

Links

What makes SeawayCity.com a web portal, is ALL the links. It is our “go-to section” that visitors who come here really like, because IT’S ALL HERE! So spread the word! If there is something that isn’t here, we have that covered too, right here!

News headlines

The news headlines on SeawayCity.com are selected and reported by CTV News, which is the news division of Canada’s CTV Television Network. The headlines are provided to us via an RSS feed, which is updated several times during the day and features the top ten stories happening right now in Canada and around the world.

This day in history

Our newest content offering on SeawayCity.com is this day in history, where we display events, births, and deaths, all of which have occurred on this day in history.

It is our most challenging feature. The data that we were provided contains some errors and is incomplete. Our initial challenge was to import the volume of data into our MySQL database and massage it in such a way as to adhere to the format required by the CMS plugin we use to display the information to our website visitors on a daily basis. Please use the following link to report any errors.

Tweets @seawaycity

We currently don’t have a big social media presence, but we recently created a Facebook page and activated our Twitter feed, to which you can tweet @seawaycity. At the moment, we are following the City of Cornwall. We will undoubtedly be following more in the future. If you are in the Seaway City, have a Twitter feed, and would like us to follow you and post your tweets on SeawayCity.com, please feel free to contact us. Of course, feel free to follow us as well.

Visitor information and internet tools

When visiting SeawayCity.com, you are presented with visitor information such as your country flag, IP address, your internet service provider and its location. Additional internet tools to help you navigate the internet such as speed test, down detector, NS lookup, ping and traceroute, are also provided.

SeawayCity.com timeline

The following is a summary of SeawayCity.com highlights in the years that they have occurred.