Hey Kass,
Kathryn Schmitt wrote:
> I am very pleased to inform you that BBC Weather's first RSS feeds are
> now live. Links to them can be found on all 5 day forecast pages:
> _http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/5day.shtml_
That's great. :) I know an awful lot of hard work must have gone into this.
My first comment is that, whereas the mass of feeds is fine if you just want
to pick one and subscribe to it or put it on your web site, there seems to
be a lot of duplication overall (I thought I remembered reading a post about
the mapping of postcodes to forecasts, but I can't find it now :-/ ). For
example, the following are all the same forecast for Aberdeen - presumably
from the same weather station, given the web pages all have the same
"Nearest weather observation station" coordinates - and the feeds only
differ in the partial postcode and slightly different lat/long given:
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/world/0014.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1013.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1012.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1011.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1010.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1009.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1008.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1007.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1006.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1004.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1002.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1001.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1000.xml
I've noddily plotted these on a Google Map:
http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/bbc-weather-map/
from which I work out that the world feed's location (the one in yellow) is
presumably the location of the weather station, not Aberdeen. :-)
Searching for a Aberdeen postcode gives one of the above feeds (though see
below), searching for Aberdeen gives id/1000, whereas going through the UK
map - http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/ukweather/sscotland/ - gives world/0014.
Is there a reason that the postcode searches don't just map to a single feed
for Aberdeen, e.g. the world one? I guess the current answer for a
hypothetical backstage developer is just to use the world feed, but then
it's hard to work out/get e.g. just the Scottish feeds.
Secondly, still on Aberdeen, there are two locations with (currently)
different forecasts with exactly the same co-ordinates:
AB14 (Aberdeen/Peterculter):
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1005.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1006.xml
and AB13 (Aberdeen/Milltimber):
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1003.xml
http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/1004.xml
I presume that local changes are made to the non-Aberdeen locations because
of some other information, but this does make it look a bit odd. :)
Anyway, glad to see the licensing issues sorted, and look forward to more in
the future.
--
ATB,
Matthew
http://www.dracos.co.uk/
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