Getting the (US only) Weather Forecast on a Vintage Machinebeing able to save the URL in favorites so I don't have to type out that rather long address.
Assuming that one has an internet-enabled vintage machine (my IIgs has the Uthernet II, Webber, Contiki and other free software), how to get current weather forecasts for some area of the US?
I thrashed about with this for forever and a day. I banged around on The National Weather Service quite a bit (including FTP and warnings from Google) and then I found a solution that works very well.
Just do it in the URL. Use airport codes, and send them to FrogFind, which is an amazing piece of software from ActionRetro. I picked a small prop-plane airport about five miles from my home and used it's IATA code of K12N like this:
frogfind.com/read.php?a=https://forecast.weather.gov/zipcity.php?inputstring=K12N
Instant results from the NWS. Tried it in Contiki (took a bit of typing) and it works fantastic.
I switched over to Webber (by Speccie) and did the same. The correct data loads quickly, but the font is a bit hard to read in Webber. I am not sure if it is Webber or FrogFind with the font issue. However, it works. The nice thing about Webber is
Ultimately, I was able to reach my goal of quickly reading the weather forecast on an Apple II. I do wish Contiki had an option for a saved URL, but I'm not the coder who could do something like that.
Thanks for reading. Posted from an Apple IIgs.
Matthew
I switched over to Webber (by Speccie) and did the same. The correct data loads quickly, but the font is a bit hard to read in Webber. I am not sure if it is Webber or FrogFind with the font issue.
It's kinda funny you ask about this as I've actually been working on an
NDA for the IIgs that does what you want on and off for years (I started
in 2015!). I've been working on it again in recent times and have it
calling a weather API, parsing the JSON response, and displaying the
results in an NDA window. There are a number of features that I do not
have working yet, but watch this space. :-)
Cheers,
Mike
I assume you have read the Webber manual, but maybe you missed the two features in Webber to help you with such pages.
You caught me, I missed that part. I tried it, and black and white fixes the concern perfectly. Thanks for writing... it's pretty cool to chat with the person who invented the software I am using right now to reply!
I am quite used to that. Webber was written simply an update to the now defunct 25 year old SIS script set for Spectrum...
Just asking out of curiosity... Is Webber a finished product, or do you still revisit development?I revisit my software if bugs are reported, I have an idea of useful features I could add to them, or time permits. Some of my software I will probably never revisit, but there is a pending bug with Webber I will probably fix sometime soon.
Before then, there is no substitution for reading through the software manuals at least once! :-)
May I report one thing that comes up for me regularly... now, this could be my particular system, as it is accelerated. When I use OA-R to switch to B/W (a great feature), very often the navigation history runs down the screen along with whatever textfrom the web page I am on. It can go away by clicking around the menus, but does always seem to come back. Only happens in B/W mode.
You win no prizes, but you are the first to report the bug that I
mentioned. I have another bug in the HTML Tool to work on first, but an update is not too far away...
Well since you're in there, could you throw in an option for always B/W?
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