Interesting site to maybe parse.

[jsmorley]

Here is an interesting site that someone might want to parse and make a skin out of.

It is RadURLs, which was talked about on Lifehacker today. It lists the top "trending" topics on Twitter and Facebook. It can be sorted by the "most trending", "highest on Facebook" or "highest on Twitter".

It updates every 15 minutes, so don't beat it to death.

I was messing around with it but decided the information just wasn't quite my cup of tea. However here is the beginning of a skin, with the WebParser measure to get the top 10 items "link / description / source" from the site, and one set of "child" measures for the first item.

Code: Select all

[Variables]
URL=http://radurls.com/index.php
get=.*<div class="row [a|b]">.*<div class="url"><a href="(.*)".*class="livepreview">(.*)<.*class="dom">(.*)<.*

[MeasureSite]
Measure=Plugin
Plugin=WebParser
URL=#URL#
RegExp=(?siU)#Get##Get##Get##Get##Get##Get##Get##Get##Get##Get#
DecodeCharacterReference=1

[MeasureLink1]
Measure=Plugin
Plugin=WebParser
URL=[MeasureSite]
StringIndex=1

[MeasureDesc1]
Measure=Plugin
Plugin=WebParser
URL=[MeasureSite]
StringIndex=2

[MeasureSource1]
Measure=Plugin
Plugin=WebParser
URL=[MeasureSite]
StringIndex=3

...

RadURLs.png

[sa3er]

Nice one.
Thanks for sharing.

[moshi]

how about turning this into a "services i don't use, but might be interesting for you" thread?

for example there is this nice weather radar map service by the Iowa Environmental Mesonet.
it has all kind of cool settings, like bounding boxes (a user could define his state and a skinner could pass this to a geolocation api to get the lat/lon values), size, timestamps, storm warnings, etc.

you could create maps like these (or animations if you use the timestamp setting to get multiple maps):

http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/GIS/radmap.php?layers[]=nexrad&sector=conus&ts=201311161000&layers[]=lsrs&bbox=-80.6,36.5,-75.2,39.4&width=300&height=200

radmap (1).png

http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/GIS/radmap.php?layers[]=nexrad&sector=conus&ts=201311161000

radmap.png

more info: http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/GIS/radmap_api.phtml

hint: without a timestamp setting, you'll get the most current imagery.

i don't use it though as it's for the US only (it probably also works for southern Canada and northern Mexico).

[fonpaolo]

If there could be a similar map, but for all (or almost) the other countries...

[moshi]

If there could be a similar map, but for all (or almost) the other countries...

Navlost is global, and i would consider it to be even more powerful.
but it's probably not for the average Rainmeter skinner.
http://www.navlost.eu/nwxs/doc/desc

scraping a website would likely be easier.

[fonpaolo]

Thanks moshi, for that site, is not for the average final user, more than for the skinner...

I did a lot of searches (well, at least for me...), I have found some good radar maps, but unfortunately not all the planet is covered and some countries only partially, others instead aren't so easily understandable by an average user... and some not even from me!

I'm using this radar map as an extension to my weather skin, it's very useful (for me) but not so easy to find images for most countries and not for an average user, since it has localization point (I know that with some maps could be embedded) and it's centered on the country (with ImageCrop...) and has some other features.
To edit it a good skill on how to create/edit skins is indispensable, so, I think I must keep it only for me.
...make it "user friendly" is almost impossible, too many variables/calculations, only to have a radar map.