[GreenKeys] Heavy Metal weather forecasts

[John Nagle]

> From: "Larry Tighe"<larryradio at att.net>
> Subject: [GreenKeys] Heavy Metal
>
> Is there a way to make HM up to date?  I ask it for weather in Newark, NJ
> and it comes up with May 4 2011.  It's been stuck there for some time.
> Other locations are the correct date.
>
> lar
>

    The National Weather Service has abandoned that service.
The NWS has replied to me:

   From: NWS Webmaster <W-Nws.Webmaster at noaa.gov>
   Subject: Re: FTP feeds months out of date - discontinued

   The city text forecasts are being phased out.

   You are able to get the city forecast in an XML format by
   using the SOAP or REST services at:
   http://graphical.weather.gov/xml/

So Heavy Metal needs a rewrite in this area.

The NWS fields are rather abstract; you get XML data and will
have to create a text description from it.

Weatherbug.com RSS feeds look promising. See

http://feeds.weatherbug.com/rss.aspx?zipcode=07102&feed=currtxt,fcsttxt

I process RSS feeds in "baudotrss"; it's not that hard.  Heavy
Metal needs to read that URL, go down to the <item>, and
convert the HTML to text within the item, dropping
any links and markup.  No big deal.

				John Nagle