Saturday, November 22, 2008

iGoogle gadget

For those of you who use the iGoogle homepage, a gadget has been created that puts the latest readings from the UW weather station right on your homepage.

As well as the latest readings the gadget also displays the current weather conditions (at the moment it comes from weather underground, but we are working on making current condition statements from the UW weather station data) and any current Environment Canada weather advisories. You can also set it up so see the latest postings from this blog.

Thanks goes to Wayne Jenkinson for creating the gadget.

Here is a sample screenshot:


You can just search for "UW weather station" in the add a gadget page of iGoogle or here is the direct link:

http://www.google.ca/ig/directory?hl=en&url=praxistech.ca/uwweather/uw-weather-gadget.xml


Please try it out and leave some feedback.

Also if there is any other way that you would like the weather station data to be delivered please leave a comment to this post.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome, looks great. Thanks for this gadget.

Unknown said...

For the Vista Sidebar, there's gadgets for The Weather Network etc... I think it would be neat to also have a gadget available there to give updates...

Unknown said...

Being able to add mini 24hr graphs would be neat.

Making the same layout as the widgit on a webpage would be great for mac users to make a webclip of.

Has the weather station ever considered getting a webcam?

Thanks for an awesome gadget!

Anonymous said...

i use yahoo widgets, and would like to see one for that.

Mapleson said...

The gadget does not use UW information. I previously had the Google WeatherBug gadget installed and the 'UW Weather Station' is giving the same reading from Google as the WeatherBug, while the actually weather.uwaterloo.ca website gives a different reading.

Wayne said...

Hi Matt -- thanks for mentioning WeatherBug. It's a very cool gadget - something to shoot for.

The data comes from the XML feed from weather.uwaterloo.ca. The only explanation for differences between the web page and the gadget itself would be latency i.e. the gadget is showing old data because it hasn't updated yet or it's having trouble connecting to refresh the data. Try refreshing the gadget and see if it matches up, and verify the reading time on the gadget matches the website.

Having said all this, we haven't tested the gadget on all browsers and platforms. If you think you've found a bug please post it to the "About this gadget" page. I'll follow up any issues there.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone.

Frank said...

Re: the webcam question

As we don't have an actual computer at the weather station site I'm not sure how we could set up a webcam at the station.

There would also be power considerations as I'm not sure that our solar panel could support the extra power drain.

The only viable option that I could see would be a webcam connected to the weather station computer in Engineering 2.

It wouldn't show the actual weather station conditions, but would still be representative.

Anonymous said...

Cool! I've had a feed on my iGoogle homepage for some time now, this is a nice upgrade :)

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