Skip to Content
Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom
book

Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

by Ben Hammersley
April 2005
Intermediate to advanced
270 pages
7h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

Podcasting Weather Forecasts

The podcasting technique described in Chapter 4 is a hotbed of development at the moment. One idea put forward was to use it to deliver weather forecasts via a web service and a text-to-speech application.

Jorge Velázquez put together a script to do just that. Released at http://www.jorgev.com/archives/000115.html, it requires an account with weather.com and an installation of Lame (from http://lame.sourceforge.net/) and text2wave on the server.

How to Use It

The URL accepts two parameters, locid and unit . The locid is the weather.com location identifier for the city you require. For U.S. cities, this can be a zip code, and for non-U.S. cities, it is a special weather.com code. (e.g., 92126 for San Diego, CA, or ITXX0067 for Rome, Italy). The unit parameter is optional and can be either m for metric or s for imperial measurements. It defaults to imperial.

The location code for Florence, Italy, is ITXX0028, so the URL for the feed would be http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/weather.cgi?locid=ITXX0028. Simple.

The Code Itself

Jorge’s code is, in his own words, very simple. This is how he describes it:

A brief explanation of how the script works, it’s actually quite simple: I first call into weather.com’s XML Data Feed. Then I use XPath to extract the data in which I am interested. I format this information into a text file, which I then pass onto the text2wave utility which performs the text-to-speech conversion. Finally, since wav files are so huge, I convert ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Content Syndication with RSS

Content Syndication with RSS

Ben Hammersley
XML Hacks

XML Hacks

Michael Fitzgerald

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008813Errata Page