Results tagged “Weather” from Cordinc Blog

Today I shut down my historical weather website. It continually broke because BBC Backstage Weather kept changing the format of their RSS feed. It became too much effort to maintain the site in a working state, so it had to go. Since there was only ever 943 hits on it and the vast majority of those were me, I don't feel too bad. It served its purpose and I learnt quite a bit from writing it. In any case, I should focus my limited spare time on more useful projects.

I have kept weather_report up in case anyone wants to take it up and use it, but they would have to fix it for the new RSS format first.

Update: The weather_report project and the weather archive is no more. The effort required to maintain it was too great, for more information see here.

Today I have released my first Ruby gem: weather_report, version 0.0.1. It connects to the BBC Backstage weather API and gets weather observations or forecasts for thousands of cities worldwide. Don't be fooled by the low version number, it is usable. However, it can only handle the BBC weather feed, requires pre-knowledge of BBC weather location ids and is metric only (all things I plan to fix).

require 'weather_report'
# 8 is the BBC Backstage weather code for London, UK
londonWeather = WeatherReport.new(8)

# to get the current temperature
londonWeather.observation.temperature 

# to get the tomorrow's max temperature
londonWeather.forecast.for_tomorrow.max_temperature

# and much more!

sudo gem install weather_report

There is also a website with documentation here.

I would like to say thanks to the authors of newgem and this rubyforge tutorial, both of which greatly aided in weather_report's creation.

Update: The weather_report project and the weather archive is no more. The effort required to maintain it was too great, for more information see here.

I often have ideas for little projects, most never go anywhere, but some act as distractions and bother me until I complete them. Recently, I wanted to know what the weather was in London a few days in the past. Easy, I thought, I just find it online. I couldn't. There are many sites with the current weather or forecasts. However, I could not find any with historical weather. So I quickly created one based on my knowledge of BBC Backstage.

I have put the system up here. It is still at an early state, it may change or be shutdown. At the moment it displays only last month's historical weather forecasts.

Recently for a little project I wanted to get weather reports, and being in London my first thought was to use BBC weather. Doing a little searching, the BBC provides a number of RSS feeds for its data (news, weather, etc), as part of the Backstage project. Details of the weather feeds are here. This post gives some of the tips and tricks I discovered using these feeds.