Weather with you

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Fellow bloggers and devotees of RSS feeds who live in the northern hemisphere, particularly those whose continent starts with either U or E (that’s ‘USA’ or ‘Europe’), are well served for weather information.

However, we here in the Antipodes are not so well served at all. Indeed, in Bloglines I can just type in my postcode and up comes a feed for my city. Unfortunately the feed for Adelaide that comes from the USA can best be described as ‘not entirely accurate’.

Until recently, if I wanted to find out the weather forecast I either subjected myself to local radio (erk!) or watched the nightly news (ugh!). Neither are overly appealing.

However, I can triumphantly announce that an RSS feed service for Australian weather, provided by Australian forecasters, is nigh. Your humble correspondent is at this very moment risking my feed aggregator’s life and limb to beta-test a new service by one of Australia’s most respected commercial weather enterprises, a company that very successfully serves the huge agricultural market of this wide brown land.

So far the testing has shown a few hiccups in IE7 betas and my aggregator of choice, GreatNews, does something funny with the feed, too. I’ve just loaded the url into my beta version of FeedDemon2 (more of which shortly), so I’m yet to see how a ‘funded’ rather than ‘free’ aggregator handles it. Bloglines seems to handle the feed easily.

Once the service is formally launched I shall let you all know where you can find the latest weather information without risking having your eyes and ears accosted by the likes of aging and unfunny commercial radio ‘jocks’ (or is that ‘jokes’?) and Sandra Sully* wannabees.

Sandra Sully

*Note for aliens and other non-Australians: Sandra Sully is one of Australia’s top news ‘female head-and-shoulders’ and is on a long and so far slow campaign to give herself credibility by fronting other tv shows. As Network Ten, the network she works for, says in their bio blurb about her:

“To viewers she is an absolute delight, a professional journalist with the expertise to transcend the ‘read’ and really ‘tell’ the story with warmth, sincerity and the ability to be objective at all times.”

[UPDATE: brilliant satire on Sandra Sully from The Chaser]

Others would argue that there are no newsreaders on the commercial channels that are allowed to tell the story with warmth, sincerity and objectivity. The ‘head and shoulders’ of news broadcasts in Australia are insipid, by design and legislation — one misses the scathing archness of ‘Robbo’ (Clive Robertson) who let you know by voice intonation, dramatic and comedic pauses, and arched eyebrows exactly what he thought of a story. These days MSM news services are not allowed to express any opinion at all — “just the facts, ma’am; just the facts.”

Not so with current affairs programmes, but certainly with news shows.

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