South African Weather Widget
The past couple of days I looked into widgets. Stefano got me hooked on this. It seems that widgets are becoming the “next big thing“. I downloaded and installed Yahoo! Widgets and played a bit with it. (Don’t worry Gerry and Jayx, I only looked at it and did not read the development docs. Yet! Know that deadline is looming…)
I was especially intrigued by the weather widget. It looks STUNNING! So I thought “Okay, lets just change it to show George, South Africa’s weather!”. HAH! No can do! No African weather there! Maybe I can do a widget for African weather? (AFTER all the deadlines, k?) Hmmm… not so easy as it looks. Don’t get me wrong, developing the widget is pretty straight forward. It uses Javascript and XML. The real problem here is finding a weather API! I emailed Weather SA and asked them for their API so I can look at it. Unfortunately, they have not yet responded, but I heard from a friend of mine that they do not have an API. They only have a huge XML file they keep updated, but for accessing that file you need to pay!
Bummer… While the map guys in SA like Map-IT is crapping themselves due to Google Maps hitting the South African shores, maybe someone could make the weather guys also shake in their boots? If you know of any options/alternatives, let us know!
Word to Weather SA. You really should cater for leaving out the www. I typed in only weathersa.co.za (without the www) and it could not find the site. Only after I typed www.weathersa.co.za the site opened. We’re in 2.007 already… The www is slowly become deprecated. Wake up!
technorati tags:yahoo-widgets, weather, south-africa
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API, Web 2.0, javascript Stii
Sneaky Google!
Google anounched that from December 5, 2006 they will no longer have their SOAP driven Search API and have replaced it with an AJAX Search API.
Why is this sneaky? Well, the SOAP API worked that everything happened behind the scenes. You sent your search terms to the API using an interface YOU designed, received the data back from the API and formatted it the way YOU wanted. A visitor never even knew that Google was doing the search. It also allowed you to mashup the data from Google with data returned from other API’s.
Now, using the AJAX API, you are giving a piece of your site to Google. You can no longer manipulate the search data returned by the API. You also do not have control over what Google do and don’t do with the data, in other words, if they decide to display sonsored links, you’ll have to live with it…
technorati tags:google, ajax, web2.0
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API, Techie stuff, web development Stii
