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Accuweather feed is broken for international locations

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jsmorley
Developer
Posts: 22628
Joined: April 19th, 2009, 11:02 pm
Location: Fort Hunt, Virginia, USA

Accuweather feed is broken for international locations

Post by jsmorley »

It seems the special Rainmeter feed for AccuWeather that has been on the way out for many months (they had said they were going to kill it right after the first of the year) is now disabled for "international" (non United States) locations. This may or may not be fixed folks. We have been saying for months that everyone needs to move to another feed for getting weather information. Today the chickens come home to roost.

You are almost certainly impacted if you live outside the US, and you have a weather skin that uses a URL which looks something like this:

http://rainmeter.accu-weather.com/widget/rainmeter/weather-data.asp?Location=whatever

There are lots of alternative weather skins, and the default Enigma skins which ship with Rainmeter are not effected as they use an RSS feed from Weather.Yahoo.com.

But you are on your own to find a skin that will replace the broken one you have, and make it look and work as you wish. We CANNOT "fix" your skin, and we are not in the business of writing custom skins on a per user basis.

Please do not post a message in "Rainmeter Help" asking for folks here to convert your skin from AccuWeather to Yahoo. It isn't that easy, as the level of detail, the RSS feed, and even the icon names are different. It's time to either find a new skin that works on devArt, or learn how to edit Rainmeter...

Having said that, here is a simple skin that you can either use or edit to change for your needs. It parses all the elements from the Yahoo Weather RSS feed, and should be easy to configure for your location. Please read the JSWeather.ini file to see how to change variables to configure things for where you live.

It looks like this for my location (Chantilly, VA in the USA)
3-1-2010 10-53-00 AM.png
And with some editing of variables in the .ini can easily be made to use Metric units, different languages, and your location code.
3-1-2010 10-17-40 AM.png
Here is the skin:
JSWeather.zip
(670.29 KiB) Downloaded 705 times
If you are not sure how to install a new skin in Rainmeter, please read here: Adding Skins
User avatar
jsmorley
Developer
Posts: 22628
Joined: April 19th, 2009, 11:02 pm
Location: Fort Hunt, Virginia, USA

Re: Accuweather feed is broken for international locations

Post by jsmorley »

New info: As of 1:00pm EST on March 1, the international feed is working again.

They are apparently doing some overhauls to their site and systems, so we may see this kind of temporary or even permanent outage again. Remember, they have said that they are going to shut down that special Rainmeter feed, we are just not sure when.

This may be best described as a "wake up call"... I really do recommend you find alternatives to the Rainmeter AccuWeather feed.
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