Five lines in the header rail, and one of them is a real number.
The ticker is the most visible part of Seasoning and the least important. It carries the weather, the live yield, where the chapter ledger has got to, what the farm is doing and the sixteen-mile rule, and it is entirely decorative.
The five lines, in order.
Two live, one semi-static, one seasonal and one that has not changed since 2020 and is not going to.
Live
01 The weather at OX7 Met Office TTL 15 min 02 The live yield Weighbridge TTL 1 hSemi-static
03 Where the ledger has got to Recording On changeSeasonal
04 What the farm is doing Season Per seasonFixed
05 The sixteen-mile rule Planning Never changesLine 02 is the only one on this site fed by a physical instrument. When the weighbridge is down it is an ops entry instead, and when there is neither the line is omitted rather than blanked.
How the rail behaves.
Rendering
- Height
- 2.1rem, published as --rail-h
- Position
- Top tier of a three-tier header stack
- Cycling
- One line at a time, on a slow horizontal track
- Under reduced motion
- Static and wrappedThe track does not animate at all
- On narrow screens
- The rail collapses entirely
Data
- Produced by
- One PHP function, dse_rail_ticker
- Currently
- Deterministic seeded values, stable for a whole day
- To make it real
- Replace that one functionNothing else reads a feed
- Yield seed
- Day of year, so the number does not jump on every request
Rules
- Never five spinners
- A missing line is omitted, not blanked
- Never a stale reading
- Past its TTL it falls back to the seasonal default
- Never load-bearing
- Nothing on this site depends on a ticker line
- Never a call to action
- It is state, not marketing
The case for an ambient ticker, and the case against.
Against: it is a moving element at the top of every page, it is the sort of thing that appears in a pitch deck and then quietly gets removed six months later, and nobody has ever bought anything because of one.
For: this is a site about a farm, and a farm is a place where the state of things changes daily and matters enormously. A header that says the same thing in February and August is a header that has forgotten what it is describing.
The compromise is that the ticker exists, it is small, it moves slowly, it stops entirely under reduced motion, and not one thing on the site depends on it. If it were deleted tomorrow the only loss would be atmosphere, and atmosphere is a legitimate thing to want.
Every line, and what happens when its feed is gone.
| Line | Source | TTL | Without the feed |
|---|---|---|---|
| The weather at OX7 | Met Office DataPoint | 15 min | The seasonal default line |
| The live yield | Weighbridge, or ops entry | 1 h | The line is omitted entirely |
| The chapter ledger | The content registry | On change | Cannot fail — it is local |
| What the farm is doing | The season | no TTL | Cannot fail — it is the clock |
| The sixteen-mile rule | Hard-coded | never | Cannot fail — it is a sentence |
Five lines
Two live, three not.
Slow
One line at a time, on a long track.
Stops
Static and wrapped under reduced motion.
Decorative
Nothing on this site depends on it.
The number in line two.
Where the crop stage comes from, what BBCH means, and what it does to Plotting.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
No. This is an unsolicited third-party demonstration build, not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the businesses it describes.
Public filings, published rankings and press reporting, each labelled on the page as a verified record, a founder claim or a third-party estimate.
