Re: Improving gweather

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 10:57:25AM -0500, Kevin Vandersloot wrote:
> Hi All. In cvs HEAD I've put some changes to gweather applet to improve
> it by fetching the forecast data from weather.interceptvector.com which
> provides data in an xml format. 
> 
> The are a few problems (with the changes, but also with the applet as it
> it now). First the person who runs the new service (Chris Petersen) only
> has limited bandwidth. Second the data is gotten from the MSN site.
> Current problems with gweather applet is that it steals data from
> weather.com and the noaa site such that if those web sites alter their
> html at all, then gweather will no longer work (and this has happened
> already in the past).
> 
> I'm soliciting suggestions on the subject. Could we possibly consider
> helping Chris by providing some more bandwidth to host
> interceptvector.com?

It sounds like interceptvector.com is less likely to keep existing
than weather.com/noaa at the moment, so unless we do something I'm not
sure it's a better choice.

I'd tend to suggest that we point the applet at an URL we control (say
weather.gnome.org) and have it expect the XML format. Then we can
either redirect that to interceptvector, or do the HTML-scraping on
the server side from noaa (we know noaa is not going to get upset,
since it's government) and then convert it to XML. In any case if we
have the applet looking at an URL/format we control we can always fix
it.

Havoc