Wednesday, December 20, 2006

In lovemygarden.net users can have a Garden Journal which is very similar to a blog, but with a few extra nice things for gardeners.

One of those is that they can enter the weather for the day, and the high and low temperatures when they add a journal entry.

Right now, they have to do it manually, and I want to have a way that they can have this information automatically looked up for them.

Ruby Quiz number 68 asked people to write a Ruby program to get the current temperature, which is pretty close to what I want.

There were two different approaches, one was to screenscrape a weather site, and the second was to use a SOAP service, and get the information from that.

Unfortunately that one that they talk about in the quiz won't work for me, it only returns the current
temperature, but it has a sweet little API.

I've looked at a few more web services, but it seems like all the good ones cost money to use and all the free ones are currently broken. Guess I'll have to leave that one for now.

Not quite as intellectually satisfying, but something that looks like it will work is to screenscrape a weather site. The example they use in the Ruby Quiz is from Yahoo, but when you look at the HTML that Yahoo provides, they explicitly say that you can't repurpose the data.

There are, however, the government websites for Canada and the US that do provide current highs and lows:

Canada - Powell River (which is where I live right now)
US - Honolulu (which is where I'm going on vacation)

When I have some time, I'm going to write up some code for lovemygarden.net and then I'll share it with you all.

Friday, December 08, 2006

I'm a monk in the Church of Emacs. Living up in the forest, in a house of Emacs. Also, my apartment.