Steampunk Weather Widget feed is working again!

Addendum (it isn't really an addendum as it is at the beginning of the document, is there a predendum? )  - NEWS! The Steampunk Weather Widget feed is working again! After the original feed went offline it took me a while to make the new widget work with an entirely new feed, the result was 95% complete I'd say - all good and coded - and then the old weather feed that it used, came back on line... That is rather frustrating. As a result I have both widgets on screen now both telling the same weather... The newer one will act as a replacement if the original feed ever fails again.

The old weather widget is here: lightquick.co.uk/jdownloads/st…
The new widget (beta) is here: lightquick.co.uk/downloads/ste…

The original is a very useful feed as it was/is one of the few completely free and unrestricted weather feeds available. It unfortunately only provides a portion of the data provided by other suppliers but it was enough to do the job, humidity, pressure, temperature and current prevailing weather information, no wind speed or direction, no precipitation. vremea.meteoromania.ro/ are the suppliers of the data feed, they are the national meteorological weather centre for Rumania. Their feed is normally quite reliable though it has had one or two offline incidents over the years - it always comes back. Their site has just undergone some work and perhaps the latest outage was due to that. If anyone needs some help on how to access the feed they only have to ask. The data is obtained by an asynchronous http request to run a specific PHP file on the server, feeding it either a city or an icao code to search for. If found, tt then returns a string with various weather values separated by a "|". The data merely needs to be split and then read into variables. Then it is up to you to format it and make it pretty.

-oOo-

Here is my original journal entry :

The steampunk weather widget has stopped working after years of steadily supplying weather data in a steampunk fashion to people's desktops. The feed for the weather data (digitair.ro) suddenly stopped providing and their feed was in such a proprietary format that it could not easily be switched to another feed without some serious re-coding. Not only that but the alternative feeds are almost all commercial and require some payment in the form of hard-earned moolah to operate. I don't really want to code for another proprietary format nor do I want to pay. So instead I am re-coding it to take it in industry-standard metar data feeds from any source, raw or formatted data. This will make the widget future proof with regard to the data at least.

Unfortunately although my chosen feed supplies all the individual meteorological elements that comprise weather it does not supply the ultimate current weather conditions (wxdata) that these individual meteorological elements create. I need a free feed that simply states the current weather is... still looking!



The new version of the widget (not yet released) states the temperature, humidity and pressure but the weather icon (centre) and the associated weather text is currently missing - it'll come though.