Re: BBC Weather Applet?

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On Tue, 2007-12-18 at 11:15 +0000, Karl Lattimer wrote:
> > I know we talked about screen scraping from the BBC weather website on
> > this list before and that's obviously a suboptimal solution. However,
> > now that there are RSS feeds available from bbc.co.uk/weather, does
> > anyone know of any panel applet that uses them? Is it possible to
> > persuade the standard weather panel applet to read them?
> 
> Is there a standard for weather over RSS? Or could it be that we could  
> push for the bbc format to be ratified as a pseudo standard?
> 
> It would be far better to extend weather over RSS to a world wide  
> standard solution then make it a part of gnome weather applet etc... I  
> think locking it down to just the bbc and just the UK (or however far  
> the bbc weather extends).

Well, it seems the "Current Observations" feed is just an RSS file with
a single item, with most of the data in the description field. Not all
together ideal, but I bet with some Python trickery it would be easy to
do something with.

I think getting a world wide standard for weather feeds and then
persuading the BBC to agree to using it may be a little outside the time
scale I was hoping for!

Regards,

Thomas