Adding a weather widget
I’ve been thinking about adding a widget to my blog to show the current weather for a while now and have finally done it now.
I have looked at a few options:
Weather Underground
The WeatherUnderground widgets are clear and informative, providing the current weather and a link to check the forecast. If you click through to the WeatherUnderground website for forecasts, there is a lot of useful information, but the page also has a lot of adverts, it is annoying.
netWeather
<
<
Weather
Forecast | Weather
Maps
The netWeather widget from Accuweather is nice, and reasonably customisable but relies on Javascript and sometimes is slow opening. Also, in testing it seemed to constantly contact the accuweather website.
Weather Pixie
While investigating another solution, I came across The Weather Pixie. It’s a bit quirky which I liked, and the figure I have used, Weatherboy6, looks (with a bit of imagination) a bit like me except he doesn’t have a beard and maybe he has a bit more hair on top. As the weather changes, the background changes and as the temperature changes, so do the clothes that the figure wears. The choice I’ve got to make is temperature, wind speed and pressure in imperial or metric. For me this is a problem, as I mentioned in my earlier post about UK weights and measures, I generally use imperial, so mph for wind speed and inches of mercury for pressure suit me best, but I use Celcius for temperature. I will use metric for the moment, let me know what you think. By the way, the time on the image is the update time, not the current time.
Posts 
![[Valid RSS]](http://blog.ijhedges.com/wp-content/themes/ijhedges/images/valid_rss_80x15_2.png "Validate my RSS feed")
Powered by FireStats
June 2nd, 2007 at 1:07 am
Well the weather pixie is quirky. But I think I would go with temp in Celcius and forget the other two measurements, if it were me. I don’t consider the other two as important but always do the temp in C. How do you get the forecast, click and go over to their site?
I like the look of the Accuweather one but it sounds too problematic.
The first one I like too, ie the long one with the forecast (then you don’t have to click through)but do you have to put it as a header and not on the sidebar as it is a bit wide.
I’m sure you’ll choose wisely.
Only 12C there? That’s a bit chilly.
regards
jmb
June 2nd, 2007 at 4:18 am
Back to say I’m trying out the weather pixie for the moment. Of course mine is female. No little old lady options though.
June 3rd, 2007 at 8:50 am
Hi jmb,
Sorry for not replying to you earlier, the system didn’t let me know I had comments
If I had a choice with the weather pixie I would ignore the wind speed and pressure anyway, that’s why I picked the metric one, easier to ignore the bits I don’t need.
No, no little old lady option, but it looks good on your sidebar. Wow 19C and it’s almost midnight, no wonder you said 12C was a bit chilly. We got up to 23C yesterday and were happy with that.
Regards,
Ian