Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Do it: Simple and free online journalism project to do in 45 minutes

Published on 23/11/07
by Zac Echola

A while back I wrote a post containing talking points for building better Web sites with little or no programming.

Well, Christmas comes early because I’m going to show you how to make a simple interface that will automatically update your site with new weather alerts. We’re going to use free data sources, free Web tools and use very, very little HTML and CSS.

Then, we’re going to use Twitter to automatically send out weather alerts to our readers.

Gathering the data and prep work

  • For this project, we need data.
  • We’ll need a basic understanding of what XML feed is and how we can leverage it. You can learn about it on your own. Just think of it like an email newsletter without the email.
  • We’ll also need permission to syndicate the feed on our site and on Twitter. Don’t forget to ask, most people who create the feeds do it knowing it will be used in ways like this.

We’ll also need accounts set up at the following free services:

The goal of this project is to pull in data (news releases, advisories, etc.) from government sources.

For this example, I’m going to use the National Weather Service but, you can use any government feed you find, really. Check to see if your city or county has feeds for anything on their sites. Do some digging. Ask around. Do what journalists do.

In the interest of being hyperlocal, I want to pull in all new results from my county in North Dakota. Thankfully, NWS has feeds for just that:

http://www.weather.gov/alerts/wwarssget.php?zone=NDZ039

Unfortunately, that feed does not validate, which means we have to figure out how to validate it. We could ask them to make a better feed, but chances are that will take time and they may never do it. We’re on a ridiculous deadline here!

Lucky for us, Google has already figured out how to deal with invalid feeds and they also have tools to share items in your reader. With our shiny new Google Reader account, we can add the subscription and stick it into a folder.

Click add subscription, paste the URL to the feed. Once the contents of the feed show up, we can add it to a folder called “weather.”

We need to get the contents of that weather folder out of our reader and into the public arena. To do this, click Settings > Tags. There you’ll see the weather folder. Next to it, there’s the RSS symbol with the word “private.” Click it to make it public.

Google does a few things with it, but all we really care about is the public page:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/11212282270208586940/label/weather

This page has a feed of its own here:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/11212282270208586940/label/weather

All that fun, invalid data is now fun valid ATOM data. Not quite squeaky clean, but it works.

By the way, ATOM is just another XML feed specification like RSS. Nothing important to the project. I just like typing ATOM in all caps.

Anyway, now we can move on to the fun stuff.

The fun stuff

Log into Feedburner. We need to burn the new Google Reader feed. While Feedburner has all sorts of fancy tracking and other tools, we only need one: Buzzboost.

Burn the feed. Give it a title and some name. It doesn’t matter. Skip to feed management. In the feed management dashboard, click “publicize” and then “Buzzboost.”

You’ll get a nice little tool to set things how you want. As this is for weather alerts, I really only care about the one most recent post by the weather service and the date. I uncheck all of the boxes except for date and set to display 1 item. Activate!

The next page will give you a little snippet of code like this:


<script src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/cassweather?format=sigpro” type=”text/javascript” ></script><noscript><p>Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: <a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/cassweather”></a><br />Powered by FeedBurner</p>

Paste the script into the page on your site, where you’d like it to appear. You can adjust the look of it with CSS:

Every time the weather service updates their alerts, this script outputs the new changes, too.

You can do this with any valid feeds. My audio, suggested reading and del.icio.us pages on this blog are all fed this way.

I’ve also done quick projects for my job, if you want to see it in a more newsy context. Product Recalls is just one example.

On to twitter.

Log into twitterfeed.com. Set up a new twitter feed by entering your twitter username and password. Use the same Google feed we used earlier. Plop in the settings you’d like and have twitterfeed update every 30 minutes and pop! You’re done.

Like every project built on the cheap there are downsides to using twitterfeed and twitter, especially for this project. 1) Users need to have a twitter account to sign up for the weather alerts. Registration is always a hurdle. 2) twitterfeed will only check for updates every 30 minutes which isn’t very helpful when there’s a tornado already on your street.

Twitter works better for breaking news, I think, or for infrequent updates. The New York Times has a twitter strategy for all of it’s sections if you need an example.

Even if you don’t have these accounts set up, this project takes almost no time or skill. Yet, it’s useful and once it’s done, it’s done forever. There’s no follow up management involved at all.

You can have this done in under an hour. Easy. Just start hunting for feeds. Get creative and let me know how you’re using this stuff.

The end. Or is it?

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