Weatherpixie

July 30, 2002 10:06 AM

Weatherpixie is a cute, customizable weather report graphic, populated by a single pixie/stortrooper for attitude. Does anyone know of other similar weather services which offer regularly updated remote weather reports for your page, whether in text or graphic format? WUnderground's weather stickers, for example.
posted by brownpau (21 comments total)

weather.com offers two options for inserting weather reports on your own website. but they're not as cute as the weatherpixie.
posted by catfood at 10:11 AM on July 30, 2002

I'm getting an XML feed from Boy Genius.
posted by muckster at 10:33 AM on July 30, 2002

muckster: do you know of any other XML weather feeds? I'd llike an international one that I can parse for my site; most sites like Wunderground only offer pre-formatted pics.
(sorry if weatherpixie offers this, but the site is down now so I can't check it out)
posted by krunk at 10:53 AM on July 30, 2002

krunk, it's most likely US-only, but there is a SOAP interface to a temp check at xmethods. Here's the wdsl file for it. You pass along a zip code and it reports back a temp.
posted by mathowie at 10:57 AM on July 30, 2002

Well, (shh) I wrote a little scraper for one of my sites, it wasn't too difficult. Just nab the data from weather.gov, and parse it out as needed.
posted by glenwood at 10:58 AM on July 30, 2002

krunk, Boy Genius doesn't offer one because its data comes from the National Weather Service. It's the only such feed I am aware of. I'd love an international feed myself but haven't been able to find one.
posted by muckster at 11:01 AM on July 30, 2002

(I think we just blogdotted Weatherpixie. Sorry, Tamsin!)
posted by brownpau at 11:09 AM on July 30, 2002

The Canadian government's weather office pages seem like they wouldn't be too hard to parse, but I guess that only helps if you want Canada.
I'm surprised there isn't a global weather site that offers this service... how long until Google will have it? :^)
posted by krunk at 11:48 AM on July 30, 2002

PHPWeather is a nifty program that gives you a truckload of weather info. The latest version has also implemented some icons. Non-programmers may have a wee bit of trouble -- I did -- but you can figure it out after a bit. :) It definitely handles international weather -- in fact, it *favors* international weather, with information described in Celsius and km first, Farenheit and miles second.
posted by metrocake at 12:13 PM on July 30, 2002

Ooh, and for you Mac OS X users, try out WeatherPop. It resides in the menu, displaying an icon with the current weather and temperature. Click on it to reveal a pulldown menu with lots of additional stats for your area. Configurable for multiple locations.
posted by warhol at 12:18 PM on July 30, 2002

WeatherNext.com offers a few options for displaying weather forecasts on web sites. Unfortunately, it only offers forecasts for just about any US ZIP code and, apparently, selected Canadian cities.
posted by fredosan at 12:23 PM on July 30, 2002

I used to use this Weatherbug thingie but I got tired of the constant emails from them asking me to update, etc. But it was cute and I did enjoy it for a while. Not sure if it's what you're looking for....
posted by Lynsey at 12:29 PM on July 30, 2002

If you know how to read the output, the following URL will get you the most recent weather data with only a tiny bit of formatting.

http://www.met.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/mikeg-weather?comm=metar&stat=grr&time=last

comm is the type of output (metar, metarfd)
stat is the three letter station code (grr (Grand Rapids) in this example)
time is the report that you want (last returns the latest data, a number returns that many recent readings plus the latest forecast).

http://www.met.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/mikeg-weather?comm=zone&stat=grr&time=last will get you the NWS zone forecast, but that will be pretty ugly to parse.
posted by iceberg273 at 12:30 PM on July 30, 2002

For that matter, you could just request a nearby METAR (more information) from the NWS using a URL like http://weather.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/mgetmetar.pl?cccc=kgrr (this should work worldwide; cccc is the ICAO airport code).

Today's weather data bonuses:

A guide to interpreting METAR (130 kb jpeg), and an airport locator so that you can obtain ICAO codes.
posted by iceberg273 at 12:46 PM on July 30, 2002

PHPWeather is perfect! Thanks for the link, metrocake. I'd encourage anyone who's interested in weather feeds to check it out. Very extensible!

Now I just have to implement the formula for every Canadian's least favourite phenomenom.
posted by krunk at 12:50 PM on July 30, 2002

PHPWeather gets its data from here, I believe. That's the best place to get METARs that I know of, as you don't have to "scrape" them out of anything. Each file contains the latest METAR for that station, and nothing more. The server is rather slow, unfortunately, most likely due to all of the programs and sites out there that constantly hammer it for weather info...
posted by whatnotever at 1:33 PM on July 30, 2002

Metapixie is cute?
posted by agregoli at 3:04 PM on July 30, 2002

Sorry, Weatherpixie. Dammit. I'm just so tired right now, pay me no mind. Erase this message from the begining so the ending won't be heard.
posted by agregoli at 3:05 PM on July 30, 2002

Metapixie. :)

Maybe before the new server it would've been useful.
posted by ODiV at 3:31 PM on July 30, 2002

Check out weatherbug....works well.
posted by Oxydude at 4:24 PM on July 30, 2002

Metapixie reminds me of the Weatherbird on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, lower right hand corner. His clothing, appearance and accesories change every day depending on the forecast.
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:59 AM on July 31, 2002