How’s the weather up there…?

Posted on January 13, 2003 by Ken

An extreme bout of long-lived geekiness, I set up a weather side-box to let you know exactly what the conditions are over here in Wharton. Why is this so geeky? Well, although you will never have to deal with it, our little weather box is the result of an XML stream formatted through custom PHP script. Yeah, I could have gone with any number of solutions all over the web (such as weather.com’s Weather Magnet), but I didn’t want any of those loud banners tarnishing our site. ;-) If you really want to read about my misadventures in the consumer-XML space, you can look at our beta site. Enjoy!

About Ken

In a glass case of emotion
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5 Responses to How’s the weather up there…?

  1. Ryan Abrams says:
    January 14, 2003 at 9:40 am

    Hmm.. The weather thing and safari don’t seem to get along. Weird. Maybe I will add one of these to my blog for testing purposes. ;P

  2. Ken says:
    January 14, 2003 at 10:10 am

    Yeah, Safari probably has bugs when it comes to iFrames. How about Chimera/IE4?

  3. Ryan Abrams says:
    January 14, 2003 at 2:04 pm

    You have to use iframes for your weather? Thats annoying.

    There should be a module that just puts it into MT tags. Then you could do it without iframes – just another css bar. c’mon, you know the challenge intrigues you. do it. :P
    btw – isn’t there a way to do trackbacks or something? where blogs ping each other to let them know they are updated? we should set that up. :)

  4. Ken says:
    January 15, 2003 at 4:34 pm

    Well, it’s actually an iframe surrounded by a div for alignment because IE is actually off by one pixel when you specify a width for an iframe. Go figure. There actually is an MT plugin that works with the same stream, but my problem with it is that it only grabs the data when you rebuild your site in MT. If I went with that, you’d have the current weather as of Monday night at 7:30pm. That sucks worse than iframes. :)
    I could have integrated the weather into the page if I made the whole thing PHP, but I didn’t want to go breaking templates over it. Maybe in the next release. ;-) This is more proof-of-concept than anything.

    There is a way to set up trackbacks. I turned it on for kennsarah.net/beta, so we can play with it there, if you like.

    K

  5. Ryan Abrams says:
    January 15, 2003 at 4:46 pm

    Hehe. I just went ahead and enabled it on mine – apparently all I had to do was “enable ping(s)” – So that’s nice.

    Oh, and to make it php, just change the main index name to “index.php” instead of “index.html” – it works perfectly (if you remember to remove the old index.html)

    Anyway, starting to get into this thing. Not a bad system. :)