Dear eclectic-tech,
Thank you for locating an actual working, real-time feed, website widget. Brian's widget is a wonderful work and it has far more information available than the Yahoo! widget, though it does take-up a bit of on-screen real estate. I hope you don't think me unappreciative of your trying to point me in the best direction in keeping with the request I made concerning the Yahoo! widget but I really am looking to try to repair the Yahoo! Konfabulator earthquake widget. I wish you would download the original widget from the (safe) link I provided and take a look at it; it's a very (comparatively) small version of the "world map' (3.5" x 1.8") and it's rather elegant and it can be positioned to sit unobtrusively on the screen. Lately, when it loads during boot-up it flashes a brief "Loading Data" in white lettering; this flashes about three or four more times and then, in the lower two-thirds of the widget, a message in red lettering reads: "unable to load data from usgs.gov". I believe strongly that the fix is probably a simple one, and that would be to update the usgs.gov feed link on the appropriate line in the open source code but I have no idea how to do it. I mentioned in my earlier original post that a kind person over at Donation Coder provided a fix for the Yahoo! weather widget. She fixed it for herself but was kind enough to make her fix available to everyone who wanted to see their own copy of the Yahoo! weather widget functioning again. Here's her response: "I am glad you can enjoy the weather widget again. It's my favorite of all weather widgets, including any that I can stick on my phone.
To fix the weather widget, I had to do quite a bit of googling to find out what the problem was (weeks of searching). I finally found a hint at a possible solution on some forum, related to some other widget application, that also used Yahoo Weather's feed, which also was not working. It contained a way to fix that application and I decided to try it with the weather widget.
Then I had to find out how to decompile and recompile a Yahoo widget, which requires another widget that wasn't easy for me to find.
Once I decompiled it and was able to see the broken widget's code, I could see that it was pointing to a Yahoo URL that no longer worked. Since Yahoo previously had just been republishing the feed from weather.com, I changed it to the equivalent URL on weather.com's servers, removing Yahoo from the widget.
Then I just recompiled it and thankfully, it worked. I really wasn't sure if it would work, at the time, but I am glad that it did.
Unfortunately, I am not familiar at all with the Earthquake widget, and widget development isn't really my hobby. I only fixed the weather one because the problem was an easy one to fix, and I really needed to get it working again for myself. It sounds like the Earthquake widget might be a lot of work. Perhaps that's why the original developer got angry.
If you want to make a donation to me, it would be greatly appreciated. There are 3 different ways you can donate. Just pick the one you are most comfortable with." ( I did donate to her.) So, eclectic-tech, is there anything else you can do? Thanks.