Another weather source (1 Viewer)

[DarkWader]

How is WU getting the weather data? Screen Scraping?

From looking at the source of Miranda plugin, its using RSS.
It seems like its querying this address:

http://rss.wunderground.com/auto/rss_full/<city>

And from this info it displays this in the extra info:

 

[DalaNorth]

You are quite right. It is possible to download the rss feed from their website for free. The tricky part is parsing it, since it's rather poorly designed for our purpose. All the information is in one long <description> string, instead of in e.g. <temperature>, <humidity> and so on. It is quite possible though.

Regards
DalaNorth

 

[smesser]

Appears that

http://rss.wunderground.com/auto/rss_full/<zip>


works as well, However you only get todays weather and a little about tomorrow and that its.

I guess if weather.com doesn't have your city this is better than nothing.

 

[smesser]

I also looked into customweather.com and here is their reply. If you thought $250 per month was expensive you had better sit down before reading this:

Hello Steve,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, I have been traveling to Asia and will be here until Jan 28th.

We will not have a free solution for you, but I will try and find something that will work. Depending on traffic we will be looking at $3,000 to $5,000 I expect. Will this work for you?

I am open to thoughts from you as to what can be done to reduce the costs.
This is based on the 48 hour detailed, and 7 day forecast.

Perhaps you can also provide me a bit more information on how many weather hits you would expect. Does the weather automatically update in the background, or only when requested? Is it shown continuously, or only on certain areas?

Best regards,

Murray Armstrong
VP of Sales & Business Development
CustomWeather, Inc.
marmstrong@customweather.com

San Francisco, USA
(T) 415-777-2336
(M) 415-533-6195
(F) 415-777-3003

http://www.customweather.com

 

[DalaNorth]

I started an implementation using the rss from weatherunderground, but I've already given up. It's just not worth it... This is all the information I get for my hometown:

Current: Temperature, humidity, pressure, condition, wind dir/speed
Forecast (3 days): Chance of precipitation and temperature

That's it...

Missing information compared to the default weather.com:

Current: Feels like, UV, Dew, weather icon
Forecast: sunrise, sunset, hi/lo temp, icon, humidity, condition, wind, fourth day

So, to me, it's not worth the effort...

Regards
DalaNorth

 

[DarkWader]

Its good to hear that its atleast possible

@ DalaNorth:
With Miranda plugin you get much more information than from the RSS, that is true.
But since the Miranda plugin can get this information, there has to be some smart solution for it?

Perhaps if you take a look at it yourself.
Miranda Weatherplugin
WU .ini files

 

[Fafnir]

That's not that good...Right. It seems to be good to integrate three or five weather sources , such as

- www.bbc.co.uk/weather/
- www.accuweather.com
- www. weather.com
- www.weatherunderground.com/

Then choose the source for your weather according to which region is near to where you're looking for.

as long as they are for free...

weather.com or bbc-weather are for free, fast and know many regions in the world...

 

[DarkWader]

Okies, not to be a pain in the ass, but is this going anywhere?
I am building a HTPC for my father in short time, and he HAS to have the local weather he says..
With MP its not possible atm, so if this aint gonna happen I just have to install Meedio for him, that actually has the weather stations he wants.

For myself, I will stick with MP I guess. The future looks very interesting, specially now with the Mpdios talk

 

[TimZ]

I've been looking around myself for a better weather plugin. I found this on the NOAA site for us stateside folks. I didn't get a chance to really look at it close but, it appears that you can specify what maps you want by building a web address. Here's the link: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/remote/ridge_download.htm

I have to play with this site a little more to see what it can do.