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 ...
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