Hey James,
Locations are pretty difficult to add at the moment. I've not made any
attempt at an admin interface. The more organised data sources
(weather.com) have nice APIs to find this ID, but some have none at all.
The BBC has an internal one, I understand - you may want to ask if/when
this will be made available externally. I was toying with the idea of a
simple admin interface, because the lack of locations is the site's
current biggest problem IMO.
Each location page has links to the sources used to generate that
particular observation/forecast data.
The RSS feed works a treat as a live bookmark in Firefox's bookmark
toolbar. Permalinks are a problem, although I could add a guid
(http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#ltguidgtSubelementOfLtitemgt).
There is a javascript include system on MetaWeather for putting a
weather symbol or text on your site, but its not reliable yet. I may
work on that tonight :-)
You can't make your own predictions yet - only tell the site the current
simple 'weatherstate' and temperature if you think it got it wrong. A
prediction 'game' would be an excellent idea
The intention is to create a nice simple REST API for playing with the
data, and also adding your own - eventually.
Cheers,
J
-Original Message-
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of James Mastros
Sent: 06 March 2006 11:21
To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk
Subject: Re: [backstage] MetaWeather.com Update
On Mon, 2006-03-06 at 10:02 +, Jason Cartwright wrote:
Hey all,
Some new features on www.MetaWeather.com
* More locations (31 now, we're working on more)
How difficult is it to add a location? If it's just a matter of finding
the location's IDs on the various sources, could you add a form to
create your own location, then add them to the list available to the
public once they've been verified? If there's more to it then that, I'd
be interested in hearing what the process was.
* More weather data sources (Wunderground, NOAA are new)
You should probably link to your sources in the about section, possibly
with their computed goodness.
* RSS feeds for each location - e.g.
http://www.metaweather.com/Syndicate/?format=rsslocation=3
Nice. If my location were there (Abingdon, but Oxford is probably close
enough to be interesting), I might start looking more at how livejournal
will present that, and think about a better WTDI -- perhaps another
option that creates a new item when it changes it's mind about what the
weather will be, or starts predicting a day that previously had no
prediction?
* You can 'correct' observations, and add your own basic data in
Sounds interesting. Can you also make your own predictions, and see how
good they are?
-=- James Mastros
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