SE-QLD and NE-NSW Weather Page

Using RSS to Syndicate Chase Reports

Throughout this website I'm making extensive use of RSS. All site news is made available via an RSS feed, while a second feed contains only my chase reports. I believe RSS is an ideal mechanism for stormchasers and spotters to link to each other's chase reports, without needing to post links on a forum like Weatherzone's. Weatherzone's forum is an excellent resource, but quickly gets swamped with large amounts of unreliable information. With RSS syndication weather sites can easily link to other weather sites. On this site I endeavor to link from my chase reports to other reports relating to the same weather event. This means visitors can easily read lots of different reports about the same event. At the moment however this requires manually finding reports and linking them. With RSS it is possible to make this linking automatic. This article will describe how to enable your site to do this.

RSS is an XML based format. The w3c website on RSS provides heaps of information about using it. I'll just explain enough to make the syndication for weather sites work. Let's get started. Here is a sample code listing of the current chase report feed from my site. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>

<rss version="2.0">

<channel>
<title>qldstorms.com Chase Reports</title>
<link>http://qldstorms.com</link>
<language>en-uk</language>
<ttl>60</ttl>
<description>Chase Reports and Analysis from SEQLD</description>

<item>
<title>Trough Through SEQLD Produces Autumn Lightshow</title>
<link>http://qldstorms.com/reports/20060331.php</link>
<category>SEQLD</category>
<author> ()</author>
<pubDate>Fri, 31 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
<description>On Friday 31st of March, a trough through South East Queensland produced thundery rain all
day and several very nice isolated cells that came off the ranges in the early evening. The
forecast models showed excellent shear for supercell development, but it appears that none
formed, possibly due to not quite enough instability. I began my chase after knocking off
from work at around 6pm and chased through the southside. </description>
</item>

<item>
<title>Northern Tablelands and North West Slopes Chase</title>
<link>http://qldstorms.com/reports/20060219.php</link>
<category>NT/NWS</category>
<author>David Findlay</author>
<pubDate>Sun, 19 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +1000</pubDate>
<description>On Sunday I went for a day long chase in the Northern Tablelands and
Northwest Slopes of New South Wales. The forecast models indicated a marginal day, with
resonable instability but little shear. There was a convergence line along the Northern
Tablelands. I began my chase early in the morning, heading to Glen Innes. The action
started shortly after lunch time. </description>
</item>

</channel>

</rss>

Part of the stuff that will make this work for syndication of chase reports aren't part of the standard so I'll explain them all here. The first line indicates the specification of XML and the language encoding type. This never needs to be changed for this type of site. Next you open your RSS tags, and the items in the paragraph following the <channel> tag specify the name of the feed. "ttl" is the time to live. It specifies how long the minimum time between refreshes of the feed should be. The value of 60 I've set means that standards compliant readers will retrieve it no more often than every 60 minutes.

Now that we've set up the feed channel we can start to add our items. For use in chase report syndication I'd like to propose that we keep reports in the feed for at least 1 month after the report is added. This will provide ample time for all sites in the syndication network, including those manually updating, time to get the data on the chase reports. Adding an item is fairly self explanatory except for a couple of things specific to chase reports. In the <category> field I'm using an identifier to show the region the chase report is from. For instance, SEQLD for South East Queensland, or NT/NWS for the Northern Tablelands and North West Slopes of New South Wales. Using a / between different area identifiers indicates the report covers the two areas noted. I'm open to suggestions on what area divisions should be used, but to make this work well all sites in the syndication network will need to standardise on the same set.

If you have a site based on a dynamic content management system it's relatively easy to set up these feeds to be created automatically. For those of you still manually creating pages, it's just as easy to update the RSS feed in a text editor. For using the feeds, a CMS based site is best. With PHP you can set up a script to run once a day, downloading all the feeds from sites you trust and adding links to the appropiate reports. Being decentralised it gives site owners the ability to choose who's reports they trust and will automatically link.

If this method of syndication takes off in the weather community it'll make it easier than ever to find chase reports about particular days. You'll be able to find and read all reports from an event without having to search for them, or trawl through pages of Weatherzone threads. This article is a work in progress and if anyone has any suggestions or comments please email me.