After the free Weather.com feed became inaccessible, I discovered a real local weather feed: from buienradar.nl. Time to update the flash weather module.

In 2007, weather.com changed its policy with regards to the use of its free weather feed. They now demanded a link back in four different ways, and in such a way that my app would turn into a banner monster. I think they just wanted to get rid of us freeloaders. But buienradar.nl was also offering its data feed for free, so I decided to call it a day with weather.com, and change my weather module over to read *real* local data. At least buienradar.nl’s feed hasn’t got that nasty 2-hour delay, haha.

This gave me the chance to implement some extra ideas that I had: show the sunrise/sunset at the appropriate times, show wind direction and strong wind warnings, and show more than a two-day forecast, by using a scrolling box. Also, it’s now possible to pick another location from a dropdown list. And I updated the visual looks of the module as well. See the live demo, above.

showing moon phase for Februari 3, 2009

Current moon phase

Buienradar uses a different xml-structure of course, and is strong on some data, but other elements are missing. For example: weather.com gave the day’s moon phase, which I used in displaying a moon icon on clear nights. Buienradar doesn’t; luckily I found an alternative way to get the current moon phase: a calculation returns a number from the current date.

I posted this in the snippets section: get current moon phase with actionscript. And *again* I’m amazed to find that some people are trying to make money out of such a simple thing: there actually is a commercial “moon phase” app…

The buienradar feed offers a few text options, which are nice: long, short and medium descriptions. But what I like best is that it gives you mostly *uninterpreted* data. Compare that to the commercial feed that I had to use for a Ziggo weather module, where WeatherNews.nl decided when it was night and just changed the icon Id accordingly. Awful! (no link, as they serve weird code there as well as crappy data) That feed displayed “night” icons when it was still light. And no way to represent the data in a way that we as paying recipient of the data would like. Oh, they said everything could be changed, for a fee of course.

the Ziggo weather module at portfolio blagoworks.nl