February 16, 2003

New OI package: your current weather

Since we’re effectively snowbound – we could get out for an emergency, but without why bother? – I’m basically plopped in front of the computer today. And while going around various sites (including my co-worker’s) I keep noticing this nifty little weather thing. A little investigation shows that it’s a Movable Type plugin by Gavin, a familiar face around use.perl. A bit later, after investigating the data stream (from InterceptVector) and those infernal formatting issues, plus reminding myself how we do caching in OI, a new package is born. (Again on the SF site if you’re curious.)

I also had to modify the AllConsuming package I mentioned yesterday since the flakiness I found yesterday is apparently common. So instead of grabbing the source every time (using the <script src...> tag provided by AC), I grab it once, strip out all the JavaScript syntax (just 'document.write' stuff) and cache it. That way I should only hit the site twice a day since it's cached for 12 hours.

Next: New release of OpenInteract
Previous: Scary teacher story