Weather over Twitter
January 12th, 2007
And while we’re talking about recent hacks, Blaine and I whipped up a Jabber bot using his Jabber::Simple and the Yahoo weather feeds, to provide twice daily weather updates via Twitter.
Jabber is an intriguing platform to build on top of, and the more I play with it the more potential I find. I keep checking in on it every few years (since MetaEvents days), but recently its gotten much more interesting. In part thats Google’s adoption of the standard (and the subsequent enhancement in tools, libraries, and clients), and partially standards bake slowly, but at the core of it I think we’re reaching a point in the evolution of the Web where Internet-scale deployed messaging standards have a lot to offer of us. A protocol for when HTTP fails you.
If you follow these bots, you’ll receive those updates wherever you normally get your Twitters; IM, Phone, RSS, or just on the web. So far, we have bots for the following cities: Boston, Brighton, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, and Vancouver. If you’d like to see another city, just ask and we’ll provide.
Slightly out of date source available at twitter-weather - Google Code
And taking requests for new cities. Probably do a big batch of new ones sometime next week. (not really an automated process)
13 Comments
January 14th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
I actually posted on an earlier entry (announcement of the Jabber::Simple gem), but it’s probably no longer getting any face time. I figured I would try again:
My question is how can you build a bot that is less susceptible to disconnects. For example, if I have a bot running, I have yet to be able to catch the exceptions and recover (by allow the bot to retry a connection until the connection comes back up).
I get the following when I pull the network connection and I cannot find a way to recover. It may have to do with threading, but I’m not sure. Here’s the typical error message from a physical disconnect:
Exception caught in Parser thread! Exception caught while sending!
Then the bot is pretty much dead. I’m using the received_message with in a loop and I have rescue / retry statements that never catch the exception.
Any thoughts on addressing this would be greatly appreciated, Blaine!
Thanks again.
January 24th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Here’s a city for you: Oconomowoc (It’s in Wisconsin…)
February 9th, 2007 at 12:09 am
I would love the weather for Cape Town if possible (in Celcius!)
February 24th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Fresno, California please!
March 3rd, 2007 at 6:02 am
I wanted to point you at a source of some other sorts of weather information, specifically, warnings, watches, and other sorts of alerts from the NWS. All available via Jabber.
The project is called iemchat, and there is a version for public consumption. The website is at https://iemchat.com.
I thought this might be information that you might want to integrate into your Jabber/Twitter bot.
March 5th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
[...] Laughing Meme | Weather over Twitter (tags: twitter jabber weather via:vielmetti) [...]
March 6th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Jeff that looks cool, I’ll definitely check it out.
March 15th, 2007 at 10:52 am
please add oviedo,spain to the list of cities.
great project! thanks!
April 30th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
I’d really love a weather feed for Ithaca, NY. Zip code 14850.
Also, I looked for the source code using the link provided and didn’t see anything right away. I’ll look again, but I just thought that I would mention my experience when I tried going after it.
Thanks, Will
August 20th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Toronto, Canada please!
September 18th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Please add Monterrey Mexico home of the Universal Cultures Forum 2007 (Forum universal de las culturas)
thanks
November 3rd, 2007 at 7:56 am
Amsterdam, Netherlands please!
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Please add Washington, DC