log entries of timotheus

Weather Info for Mobile Devices

This morning I worked for several hours to bring an old application I wrote up to speed. It is a page for mobile devices that takes the zipcode from the user, and shows the current weather conditions, as well as a three day forecast. The page with the weather for a specific location can be bookmarked, and whenever it is hit it refreshes with the newest data.

The site pulls the data from the Weather Channel’s RSS feeds. My older version was manually parsing the entire XML file, and generally was a totally backwards way to do it. I now am using the SimpleXML functions to traverse the RSS feed, and pull out the data I wanted.

You might wonder why I made it in WML instead of xHTML, and my reason was so it could be used on even basic cellphones that have WAP access.

Let me know what you think.