Posts Tagged ‘local’

I noticed on the National Weather Service’s website they now allow you to grab the forecast by REST, whereas before they only supported SOAP requests. This makes grabbing the forecast much simpler than it was before.

If you use SOAP there are many methods to grab the data, but if you use REST there are only 2. With REST you can either use DWMLgen which lets you get a little more specific information or NDFDgenByDay which is a little simpler and lets you pick either 12 hour or 24 hour increments (so you can get each day broken in half as in day and night or the full day). The response is sent back as XML for either method so you can format the data how you like.

For the example we are doing, we are going to keep it simple and use a single location, NDFDgenByDay and a 24 hourly period. We will also set it up so that we send the longitude and latitude for Austin, TX, the current date as the start date and request 7 days worth of data.
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The NOAA’s National Weather Service provides free weather data that you can use on your web site, even if it is for commercial uses. You can’t claim to have copyright on the data, but it is public domain information. Accuweather tried a few years ago to get this service shut down because they wanted people to pay for weather information (which is part of their business). Fortunately people complained because our tax money is being spent on making this data available in the first place.

So why aren’t more people using it? It’s probably because the documentation is daunting, a little confusing and the icons aren’t that great looking. You might be wondering why not just use Yahoo’s Weather RSS feed? Well, because it’s only for non-commercial use and it only gives you current conditions, today’s forecast and tomorrow’s forecast. However once you know how to access NOAA’s data you can customize it to your liking.

Current Conditions
It used to be that you had to use the METAR service to get current conditions. METAR is a very unfriendly format and fortunately is no longer necessary. You can now get current conditions in a XML file or RSS file. I recommend using the XML file since you will be able to go through the nodes and format it to your liking. The only key here is that most require an Airport/Airfield nearby, since there are only about 1,800 locations across the United States and US Territories.

Getting Weather Forecasts
The first place to stop is the National Digital Forecast Database XML Web Service. (There are change notices the bottom of the page, but they don’t change very often; however it’s probably a good idea to subscribe to the RSS feed. Then you can make appropriate changes in the future and if there are any new features to the service you can take advantage of them). First thing you’ll notice is that there is a lot of information on this page. The service uses SOAP (basically you make requests with XML and receive XML) and there are two functions to grab the data, NDFDgen and NDFDgenByDay. Both will give you summarized forecasts over a 12 hour or 24 hour time period (your choice). NDFDgen will give you much more information than NDFDgenByDay and lets you pick what you want. You need to know the longitude and latitude of where you want the weather forecast and you can send the number of days you want forecasted. You probably won’t want more than a 7 day forecast. If you want you can even request old weather forecasts. They ask that you cache your results for an hour since that is how often they are updated (even Yahoo’s Weather RSS feed is only updated once an hour). They say they are updated 45 minutes after the hour but from what I’ve seen it’s usually around 52 minutes after the hour. If your web server is on Unix/Linux you can setup a CRON job to grab the files on the hour (although they recommend to do it 15 minutes after the hour, because there is a delay in processing and updating all their files on their servers).

I wish they would offer RSS and XML feeds for some of the bigger cities in the US, rather than just SOAP. Part of me wonders if it is due to pressure from Accuweather and the other US weather sites online, because they have big business in providing easier and prettier methods of weather information. Using SOAP in Coldfusion is pretty simple, especially if you are using Dreamweaver. If you are using PHP, take a look at NuSOAP.

For about a month I noticed the Yahoo Weather RSS feed was giving current conditions and a 5 day forecast, instead of 2. However, it seems Yahoo went back to using just current conditions, today’s forecast and tomorrow’s forecast. I suppose it was a bug they overlooked.

• Register a good domain name with SEO in mind. Better yet would be to setup a subdomains based on city.
• Hire staff that can know the web. People that know not to make images 250k or flash files that are 500k. People that know what SEO is and how it can help.
• Give prominence to weather and local news. These are the two reasons anyone goes to a local television website.
• Put up your videos. The local television has the advantage in this area, but they are not concerning themselves with it.
• Many local stations are owned by a big corporation. They should have the corporation create templates of a web site to push down to the local stations. The local stations can then hire people that know the web and maintain the site. They might not have full control over the site, but they could create ads, graphics, and modify any scripts or HTML needed. This would lessen the amount of staff for each station to hire, while big changes could happen with the developers at the corporate headquarters.

I think the main reason local television stations are not putting more importance on their web site is because they don’t see it as a threat. With sites like YouTube, people are starting to get used to watching video on the internet. Advertising is moving to the web. Newspapers understand that video and the web is their only saving grace in coming years, so they have the advantage over any local television station now and in the coming years.

Another reason is the fact the stations prefer to put out there news 3 times a day, once in the morning, 5/6pm and 9/10pm at night. Occasionally they will interrupt a show or insert a quick news brief throughout the day, but live in a 24-hour news world. They are going to have to learn that putting news on their web site is not competing with themselves but giving people another method to access it.

The last reason would have to be staffing, but it really doesn’t take that big of a staff to maintain a site. Many local newspaper sites get by with about 2 or 3 people dedicated to creating ads, html, css, javascript, minor coding and graphics. Most television web sites look like they should be hosted on fortunecity.com so it’s no wonder not many people are not using their sites. They are ugly, take forever to load, have too many graphics, blink all over the place and lack any kind of interactivity. In a day and age when throwing up a free open source PHP forum, CMS, blog, wiki is so cheap, you would think they would.

Unfortunately I think they will continue to ignore the web, similar to how the newspapers saw the web several years back.

Another smart move by improving local television web sites. I wrote earlier about Nexstar doing this before, but now Fox Interactive Media is doing this as well. Their design and templates are much better done than Nexstar, and they have some SEO in place. It’s not just big cities either, seems any city with a FOX station is getting a site like this.

Here are a few examples:

• Dallas - Ft. Worth
• Greensboro, North Carolina
• Mobile, Alabama
• Memphis, Tennesee

The SEO could be a lot better than it is, but at least some of the portals have the city name in their domain name. Which makes me wonder why they didn’t just use subdomains instead of registering a bunch of seperate domain names. They could of used cityname.whatever.com and saved a lot of money. The Metro Guide offers a lot of local data such as history, real estate, jobs and more. Seems that local data is powered by Local Matters. A lot of sites have yet to enter in data on many of the pages and most of the news seems to be National. It will be interesting to see if other companies that own television stations will continue this trend.

Seems the local online classifieds competition is heating up now. There’s Craig’s List, Kijiji (owned by eBay), Topix, MySpace, Facebook (powered by Oodle), plus your local city newspaper and probably a free weekly classifieds paper that is at most stores weekly that has an online component. Makes me wonder what other local aspects are going to have some major competition.

One thing I noticed about Kijiji is that they will not let you place an ad that will show up elsewhere. Seeing how they are owned by eBay I guess that makes sense. However Craig’s list doesn’t seem to let you post anywhere either, if they wanted to compete against eBay they could add that feature in. Kijiji also seems to have modeled their site after Craig’s List, however its better looking. I understand Craig’s List is supposed to be plain, but its taken to the extreme.

So what does local competition comprise of? I think the following is a good list for any portal or local site should have.

• autos
• real estate
• jobs
• classifieds
• map - I’d have to say Yahoo’s local map is the best, followed by Microsoft’s, sorry Google just doesn’t have the amount of information Yahoo does
• local news - its hard to get local news, newspapers and tv stations win here
• obituaries - this maybe a secret, but newpapers get a lot of traffic here
• weather - tv web sites do very well with this