#1 Weather
Be able to get weather reports, indexed by zip code?
perhaps city/state?
in the past implementations of this, data was mined
off a popular weather website (yahoo, or weather.com,
or even national weather service). Of course I did
not pull all the data for all zip codes of the US, but
just pulled them for zip codes that users belonged to,
with some SQL (@zip_codes = (select zip_code from
users distinct)), and slammed through that. we could
do a schedule of this, updating <i>our</i> database
every so-often.
the alternative is to go out and get the weather info
(httpd, ftp, however), parse it, and reply in real
time. benefits: no extra server load, always up-to-
date; cons: slow response time.
post comments/suggestions in this thread, please
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I like the idea of real-time weather information, but I'm
weary of the associated server lag. Instead, I vote to
update a local table with the weather information every 30
minutes or so (I'm not exactly sure what frequency this
should occur at).
In any case, retreival of weather information involves a
first step of going out and parsing HTML. For this, we need
a significantly more sophisticated parsing mechanism...
Must concentrate on speed, reliability of results, etc.,
and must make sure that our parsing routines always match
up to the data they're receiving.
So we'd need a script to be called by cron that acts as a
glue for HTTP transfer and HTML parsing. No problem, AFAIC.