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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13 Comments to "South African Weather Widget"

• danette said: On 02/01/2007 at 8:23 am

  …lol, and I thought it was just me getting slowly annoyed with the http://www…?
  The weather widgets for SA are mostly non existant…

  I did however find that as part of the BlogMad Firefox toolbar, you get a GREAT weather tool Try it out if you have time? Here’s where you can find it: http://blogmad.ourtoolbar.com/

  And if you click on the weather for an “Extended forecast” it leads to this site: http://search.conduit.com/ (on which you have to select the weather option, and then just search for your city).

  Hope this helps??

  (Maybe you can use that API [Whatever that is... LOL]

• Andy Hadfield said: On 02/01/2007 at 3:43 pm

  Common prob with bloody widgets. Nothing local besides Muti!

  WebCam widget of camps bay beach - now THAT’s the stuff we should look for…

• s.sessa said: On 02/01/2007 at 9:32 pm

  ehm, I get cape town on accuweather (comes standard with mac [dashboard])

  Accuweather.com

  ~Have Fun…

• s.sessa said: On 02/01/2007 at 9:34 pm
  
• s.sessa said: On 02/01/2007 at 9:35 pm

  http://farm1.static.flickr.com/128/376824190_f14d1f5058_o.png

• Stii said: On 02/02/2007 at 5:41 am

  I actually found a widget that delivers George’s weather! Funny thing is that it is delivered by weatherbug.com which is not South African.

• Sarah said: On 02/02/2007 at 12:41 pm

  At Quirk we have a term for sites that wont work without the www: Lame-Ass Syndrome or LAS, check out our definition - http://www.quirk.biz/resources/glossary/L#lame-ass-syndrome

• Peterhd said: On 02/02/2007 at 12:51 pm

  For the proactive programmer there is a way to get SA weather.

  Use metars which is/are information provided by airports for planes. Basically weather information from all the major weather centers in SA. Metars info is available here: http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml and by viewing source on an application like phpweather here: http://phpweather.sourceforge.net/ you can get a quick and dirty idea of how to format the info.

  We used to use phpweather on the M&G and it was extremely reliable.

• Stii said: On 02/02/2007 at 1:21 pm

  LOL, Sarah! Good 1!

  Peter, you are a legend, man! Will look into it. (AFTER THE DAMN DEADLINES!!!)

• Andrew said: On 04/26/2007 at 1:00 pm

  Hi, on the same hunt but for different reasons. I use Forecast Fox on my local computer which as is mentioned above uses Accu Weather. There is plenty of data out there from NOAA, I just came across their API today which can be found at: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/. I found the API at the source for all API’s Programmable Web: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/NOAA. I just can’t (easily) figure out if the API covers SA. If you look at the mash up examples you’ll notice that Ski Bonk which is using the API has info on European resorts so I guess there is a chance the API could have SA data.

• Andrew said: On 04/26/2007 at 1:16 pm

  One more mash up http://www.programmableweb.com/url/375 at that url you can check out all the API’s they are using. If you then go to the Weather Bonk site there is data for George: http://www.weatherbonk.com/weather/summary.jsp?where=george&_id=&_className=weathermaps.weather.user.WeatherRequest
  Good luck.
  Later.

• Esmari said: On 06/11/2007 at 2:07 pm

  Cape Town weather has disapeared off my macwidget (accuweather). Use to get it but not anymore. Wiped off the face of the earth. Do they know something about my future that I don’t know yet?

• Scooter Schalk said: On 03/21/2008 at 12:54 pm

  Any news on the Weather SA Widget front?

  On widegtbox there is widgets that can display weather for my small town of Botrivier, just outside Hermanus, But I am not very keen on the way it displays.

  http://www.widgetbox.com/search?q=weather&m=10&p=3

Spit it out!

Filed in: API, Web 2.0, javascript by: Stii