Weather Feeds - Change Log

• 20060811 - Moved the feeds to a shiny new server.
• 20050209 - Added pointer to TAF code documentation to the FAQ.
• 20050122 - I have added latitude and longitude coordinate information to the feeds. Coordinate information may be missing from many of the xml feed files. I may come up with a way to fix that, but I don't know when (or if) that will happen.
• 20041202 - Changed the way the wandering cities are stored and used by the script. This represents a revision change in the script. If you are one of the people running the script locally, contact me.
• 20041202 - Moved a few Mexican and Canadian feeds to their proper locations.
• 20041119 - Rewrote the script to handle new NOAA file naming convention. Contact me if you've purchased a copy of the script and need this new version.
• 20041027 - Added a couple of new FAQs
• 20040829 - Feeds for Alaska, as well as a few from the Western Canadian provinces, are now online.
• 20040828 - Arkansas is back. Sorry about that. Much thanks to Scott S. for noticing.
• 20040706 - The NOAA updated their data file format on July 1 to comply with WMO requirements. This broke all of the feeds. Things are fixed now, but if you're running a local copy of the script, instructions for fixing your copy are here.
• 20040328 - Added a couple of new FAQs, killed some orphan cities.
• 20040226 - Added a new FAQ.
• 20040214 - Prettied up the feed files using xsl. Added two new questions to the FAQ.
• 20040213 - Tidied up around the site a bit. This changelog is now a separate page. The feeds/cities list is now an XML file.
• 20040211 - There's a new field called wind_english. It's just a prettified version of the value in the wind field. If you plan on using this value in a page element, leave plenty of room for it as it can get rather long ("Northeast 22 MPH Gusting To 24 MPH", for example). The blame for yet another feature falls on Robert W.
• 20040211 - I have moved the feed files to a subdirectory.
• 20040128 - You people are killing me with this W32.Novarg.A virus. The weather@boygenius.com address is shut down. If you need to contact me, the new address is xml@boygenius.com.
• 20040127 - Quashed a bug. Who would have thought that temperatures would go into negative numbers in Albany in January? Thanks Joseph R.!
• 20031110 - I added heat index and wind chill calculations for each city. I think the formulas are correct, but tell me if you see screwy data. Good idea, Robert W.!
• 20030927 - I wrote a FAQ
• 20030927 - The data is being updated every hour. I actually changed that a couple of weeks ago, but I forgot to note it here.
• 20030925 - Corrected the spelling of "fahrenheit" (thanks Aaron!)
• 20030913 - Added a new field, last_updated_seconds_gmt. This is the same date and time as is in the last_updated field, but it's expressed as seconds from the epoch. Helpful for those of you who want to convert to local time.
• 20030902 - I think I have all of the orphan cities taken care of. If you notice any that I've missed, please tell me.
• 20030902 - There are now two more fields in each record. One is "notes", right now it will never contain anything besides message that a station operates outside of the NOAA quality control system. At some point, I might put other information in there, like storm warnings or entreaties to purchase Burma Shave. The second field is a pointer to an image file on the NOAA's system that represents the current conditions. There's a list of the possible image names in the FAQ if you need it.
• 20030902 - I've made a decision about publishing the script.
• 20030902 - The last_updated field now contains the GMT. If you need a local time, solve for it.
• 20030902 - Started working on the problem with some cities being in the wrong states. We might need to kludge things.
• 20030830 - Wrote a secondary function to remove old xml files. Files that have not been updated within the previous 24 hours are now removed. I'm still deciding whether or not this is a good idea.
• 20030830 - Now updating the information every three hours.
• 20030829 - Fixed a bug that caused a bunch of cities to go missing.
• 20030829 - Last update field fixed.
• 20030829 - City name capitalizations fixed.
• 20030828 - Conditions abbreviations are now substituted for English equivalents.
• 20030828 - I removed the "current_" designations from the field names. It seemed redundant.
• 20030828 - Complete rewrite of the generation script.
  • Many, many, many more cities.
  • Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico are now covered.
  • Reports now include relative humidity, wind direction and speed, dewpoint, and barometric pressure in addition to the information that was in the old reports.
  • The "whole country" XML file is no longer generated. With the number of cities that the data now covers, the file was just too large.