I just wanted to mention that I finally have the weather report feature working correctly again, so that you can check your local weather forecast just by clicking on the "
Local Weather" link above. If you have entered your zip code in your profile, your local weather report will automatically come up, otherwise, you will have to enter a city or a zip code, when you get to the weather page, in order to get a customized forecast. Obviously, if you live outside the U. S., you will need to enter a city, rather than a zip code.I have an agreement with "The Weather Channel", to use their data on this board, by means of an XML data feed. Unfortunately, last spring, The Weather Channel apparently changed hands, and soon after that, they changed the format of the XML feed, and their terms of service. At the time, I didn't have adequate time available to make all the necessary changes to the code, so I had to take down the link, for a while.
Part of the changes was the requirement for the addition of four more links back to their site, and these amount to advertising links, (though they do provide a handy service, for those who need local information concerning pollen, airports, outdoor activities, and traffic conditions). Since we have a policy against advertising on this site, I had to think long and hard about the addition of those links, but I finally decided to give them a try, since the advertising does not show up on this board, and the links back to Weather.com are all located on the weather page, and nowhere else on our site.
Because they chose to stick the advertising links data into the XML feed near the beginning, rather than near the end, that means that much of the weather information was garbled , (data entered in the wrong places in the output page), when the data stream was parsed by the system, for use on our site. It has taken me a few days to track down the locations in the algorithms where the problems were occurring, and to make the necessary changes in the code, but I think I finally have it all working correctly, again. If anyone receives weather reports which don't make sense, or otherwise appear to have errors, (other than the accuracy of the forecasts themselves - I can't do anything about their inability to correctly forecast the weather, LOL), please let me know, so that I can try to track down the problem.
Now if the weather will just do what we want it to do, we'll have it made.
Tex
