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Weather.com WXDATA feed failing again

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balala
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Re: Weather.com location

Post by balala »

jsmorley wrote: February 1st, 2020, 3:05 pm Found by carefully drilling down in https://weather.codes/
https://weather.codes/united-states-of-america/virginia/

Don't bother using their search box, it doesn't work... Scroll to the bottom of the page, click on your "country", then click on whatever "region or state" is correct, then use CTRL-F in your browser to search for your exact location.
In fact at least in some cases, the search box does work. Yes, looking for "Fort Hunt" doesn't return a location, but in many cases it does. For instance entering "Alexandria", I get 28 locations around the whole world, including USVA0007.
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Yincognito
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Re: Weather.com WXDATA feed failing again

Post by Yincognito »

jsmorley wrote: January 31st, 2020, 4:03 pmI will continue to chew on this, but here are my thoughts at this time.

1) ...but must be download and put in a spot on the end-user's hard drive that is appropriate for the skin they are being used in.
2) ...We are just NOT going to have updates to Rainmeter be driven by the whims of some web designer on a web site we have absolutely no control over.
3) Even if we did jump through hoops to get this working, I'm not thrilled with the implied "constraint" on how authors design and develop their skins ... all the chatter on the site will be about using this approach, and how you are a knucklehead if you don't. We provide WebParser, you decide how to use it.
4) And probably the deciding factor for me is that I don't feel like the Rainmeter project wants or needs to take "ownership" of this issue.
That's what I like about you - you value freedom and independence while still being responsible, and that is reflected on how you approach things. And you're not afraid to say no. I value these things too, and most of us are as well. On a less serious note, you'd make a good impression writing (or, why not, acting) a script for a "Braveheart" reboot or something. 8-) Your words are ALIVE! :sly:

That being said, Cariboudjan's idea is a pretty good one, or would be in normal circumstances. It's just it's too much trouble for keeping up with rapidly ever-changing things that frankly, are others' responsibility (not that they would bother to care too much about it, LOL). Not to mention that going that route would leave much less to the skin developers to work and design. Anyway, adapting to a new structure of a weather page, apart from the reasonably doable task of writing the regex, is just a matter of mapping and formatting the source in one of the dozens available services online (I've used https://htmlformatter.com) in order to see where things are located much more clearly.
kyriakos876 wrote: February 1st, 2020, 10:56 amHello guys, I found this (this is the weather for Greece,Athens for example)
https://www.weatherzone.com.au/world/europe/greece/athens
which has an RSS feed which goes like (tap the icon circled in the image below for the RSS feed)

Actually, a "separate" weather.com JSON file is accessible by looking into the page source for its address, so in theory, one could navigate to the JSON without ever visiting the main site. The problem is the JSON, as far as I've tried it, has almost no usable data if launched "as it is". However, there are a bunch of other codes and IDs on the page source, and it wouldn't surprise me to see that separate JSON providing the same data as the main site, given the proper authentication code/ID/URL is entered in the address bar...
jsmorley wrote: February 1st, 2020, 3:05 pm

If I use the old style code for my location in the skin: USVA0944...
Having said that, at the end of the day, from the standpoint of accuracy, I'm not sure it makes a huge amount of difference if you use the old code, a US zipcode or the new code. I'm just hoping that it doesn't, and won't ever, make any difference in how the site is parsed. That could get ugly indeed.
Yeah, I prefer to use the old code as well, but will have to instruct users to use the new one, since, although longer, it's easier to grab (plus, they might "retire" the old code one day). I'm not sure if it was because of changing some site preferences, new cookies being used / refreshed when accessing the data, or the fact that the "new code" is just an encrypted (doubtful, but hey, it's another possibility) form of the old one, but I clearly remember it changing itself, despite using the same location and such. So, for now, I'm still cautious about using it on a regular basis. On a side note - and this might relate to your story - what I don't like about the weather.com system is that they don't show the actual observation station, like wxdata used to. There are more such data sources for my location and for sure, having an idea on which one is used would help in understanding how far the predicted values are compared to the reality on the ground. That being said, there are also positives in the new system, like the fact that (as far as I noticed) the sun/moon data is present and more reliable than it was with wxdata.
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SilverAzide
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Re: Weather.com WXDATA feed failing again

Post by SilverAzide »

Yincognito wrote: February 4th, 2020, 9:58 pm...what I don't like about the weather.com system is that they don't show the actual observation station, like wxdata used to. There are more such data sources for my location and for sure, having an idea on which one is used would help in understanding how far the predicted values are compared to the reality on the ground....
Yes! This is super-annoying. There's got to be a hundred different observation stations across large cities like Jacksonville, Florida, and now they are all called "Jacksonville, FL" with no way to distinguish one from another. Jacksonville is large enough so weather on one side of the city can be completely different from the other side.
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djamman
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Re: Weather.com WXDATA feed failing again

Post by djamman »

SilverAzide wrote: February 5th, 2020, 12:31 pm Yes! This is super-annoying. There's got to be a hundred different observation stations across large cities like Jacksonville, Florida, and now they are all called "Jacksonville, FL" with no way to distinguish one from another. Jacksonville is large enough so weather on one side of the city can be completely different from the other side.
Agreed! Even though the long/lats for my 3 locations (85375, USAZ0223, 8d...) are within a few hundred yards of each other I can see 2 or 3 different sets of current condition information.

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QuakeGuy
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Re: Weather.com location

Post by QuakeGuy »

balala wrote: February 4th, 2020, 8:36 am In fact at least in some cases, the search box does work. Yes, looking for "Fort Hunt" doesn't return a location, but in many cases it does. For instance entering "Alexandria", I get 28 locations around the whole world, including USVA0007.
You're right. I noticed the same thing when i wrote the auto location feature for my weather skin. I would say 2 third of the requests are found with the search box, while the other third are not. But you can find all entries in the listing for that country.

I contacted the webmaster with this topic, but no response. :(
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balala
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Re: Weather.com location

Post by balala »

QuakeGuy wrote: February 5th, 2020, 6:41 pm You're right.
I'm glad you think I'm right.
gpbeta
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Re: Weather.com WXDATA feed failing again

Post by gpbeta »

Hi!
Is there anyone interested in creating a PUBLIC weather server?
Of course I'm not talking about builder some astronomic observatories all over the world, :D. Instead, it might be a web server that caches the weather data from other 3rd-party (paid) weather services.
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jsmorley
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Re: Weather.com WXDATA feed failing again

Post by jsmorley »

gpbeta wrote: February 19th, 2020, 7:51 pm Hi!
Is there anyone interested in creating a PUBLIC weather server?
Of course I'm not talking about builder some astronomic observatories all over the world, :D. Instead, it might be a web server that caches the weather data from other 3rd-party (paid) weather services.
The Rainmeter project is certainly not interested....

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