weatherbot

My IMified developer account came through the other night. I’ve been planning to take a feed from weather.com* and dish up forecasts via IM.

Update: Not only is IMified still in beta, but apparently they’re up to some shenanigans right now. So the “this (long) weekend” thing is pretty much out the window. No biggy. Also, free feeds for weather info are more difficult to come by than I expected.

However, if you like, read on to get the vibe of the thing.

The weather.com terms of use are pretty restrictive though (see VERY IMPORTANT ALL CAPS section below, bold is mine). So after I got it working with that, just to prove to myself I could, I decided to start hunting up a more open weather feed. I haven’t decided on anything yet, but I hope to have it working sometime this (long) weekend.

If you’re interested in checking it out, you’ll have to:

• first, to get access to IMified generally, add imified@imified.com as an IM buddy (Jabber and Google IM only for IMified beta, details here); and then
• add daynemay@bot.im as an IM buddy.

Once that’s done, send an IM to daynemay@bot.im, and the rest should become pretty clear.

Mental note: throw up a “projects” section on daynemay.com sometime, too, with a more detailed outline of this, and been2long, and whatever else.

Disclaimer 1: At any given time, I might be in the middle of debugging, or trying something out, or whatever, so don’t go pinning your hopes and dreams on the service giving you a timely, sensible response.

Disclaimer 2: IMified itself is still in beta, and I’m pretty sure the level of service I’m getting will cease to be free once that’s over. So if things spontaneously start not working, that’s another possibility.

YOU MAY NOT USE THE SERVICE TO CREATE WEATHER AND WEATHER-RELATED PRODUCTS TO BE DISPLAYED ON HANDHELD OR OTHER WIRELESS DEVICES.
YOU MAY NOT USE THE SERVICE IN CONNECTION WITH AMONG OTHER THINGS, ANY BROADCAST TELEVISION, INTERACTIVE TELEVISION, CABLE TELEVISION, TELEPHONE OR DSL SERVICES, DIGITAL CABLE SERVICES, HEAD-END-IN-THE-SKY SATELLITE SYSTEMS, RADIO, PRINT PUBLICATIONS, DIGITAL BROADCAST SATELLITES, TELEMATICS, TELETEXT, VIDEO-ON-DEMAND, KIOSKI DISPLAY, OR OTHER PUBLIC OR PRIVATE INFORMATION DISPLAY UNIT, WIRE-LINE TELEPHONE, OR AS ALL OR PART OF ANY STREAMING VIDEO OR AUDIO CONTENT OR FOR DELIVERY BY ANY MEANS OTHER THAN STATIC DISPLAY ON A TRADITIONAL WEB PAGE ON YOUR WEBSITE OR DESKTOP APPLICATION.
YOU MAY NOT USE ANY LATITUDE OR LONGITUDE DATA ASSOCIATED WITH A LocID OR ZIP CODE EVEN IF SUCH INFORMATION IS RETURNED AS PART OF AN XML DOCUMENT FROM THE XML FEED.

* Note: I’m deliberately not linking to weather.com, just to satisfy my own petty urges.