This morning when I booted, Weather Watcher didn’t refresh! When I manually initiated a WW Refresh it hung on the 1st Download block then returned Server not found.
When I accessed the weather.com XML data for my area it came up fine. But weather.com itself for my area would not!!
Eventually, 20 mins or so later, WW updated but for the alternate location I switched it to. But I still couldn’t get to my weather.com. The XML data was of course still immediately available.
At this point all three are accessible and current.
So, my question is, where does WW get it’s data?? If XML why wouldn’t it refresh when I booted or manually tried to refresh it? If weather.com, how could it access it when I couldn’t?
WW is lifting the data off an internally loaded web page. WW is not using the XML feed because one must register with weather.com to use those feeds. One cannot simply use them because they exist, that would be a copyright violation. One must be a registered partner with weather.com to use the XML feeds within their program, and there are a bunch of rules and guidelines that must be adhered to (do a web search for weather.com sdk). The XML feeds are much more reliable than “screen scraping” and is why weather.com offers that feature. Why WW has not joined the XML feed program is beyond me. Perhaps Mike could elaborate on this.
The real question to focus on is why doesn’t weather.com offer all of their weather information in their XML feed? If they did, I am sure more people would register and take advantage of that feed.
In addition to this the XML data shows MOON phases!!! [:D]
Once you get 5.6 released I think you should look at an XML version for 6.0. [8D] It may solve a lot of irregularities currently being encountered.
And speaking of 5.6, remember this RSS</font id=“red”> posting"
quote:[b]RSS Got Skins? Weather Watcher 5.6 does![/b]
The new release of Weather Watcher, v5.6, is on the way. I plan to release the full 5.6 version during the week of Christmas. I might release a beta before then --
Yea, I don’t know what happened to that release. I gues I didn’t release it because I got more feature requests than I thought I would get. In any case, this beta version could replace the current 5.5e version at any time. I feel it’s pretty stable. However, I know there are still alot of people out there using the 5.5e (or older) release.
quote:[i]Originally posted by Mike Singer[/i]
In any case, this beta version could replace the current 5.5e version at any time. I feel it's pretty stable. However, I know there are still alot of people out there using the 5.5e (or older) release.
There are a lot of people who just don't want to debug beta software no matter what it is so I'm sure that explains part of the 5.5 user base. Once 5.6 comes out of beta they will upgrade.