Ryan W posed a challenge to me in comments he left to my "I'm sick and tired of this weather and I want to move south" post. He suggested that a nice mashup might be in order to help me monitor the weather and important facts about prospective cities.
I took Ryan's challenge to heart and spent a couple of hours the last few evenings putting a little something together: my I Want to Move South! Mashup Beta (LINK UPDATED 3/7/07 - demo moved to its own site).
Currently it only lists the cities that I am interested it, but it shouldn't be too difficult to add a little textbox and a submit button and allow the user to store their own list of cities.
Ingredients:
- Weather: Uses a modified version of Peter Bromberg's NOAA WebService ServerControl along with the NOAA Web Service.
- Google Map: Uses a simple wrapper in the form of a server control that I created a while back to display a Google map for a location.
- Housing Market graph: a user control that call's the Zillow Web Service API.
- News Headlines: a user control that pulls the top 5 search results for the City,State from the Window's Live Search web service API.
- Census information: a user control that does a little screen-scraping from the US Census Bureau's FactFinder web site.
Directions:
- Mix all ingredients
- Add liberal amounts of caching
- Ka'ching - Rake in the money!
I have my doubts about that last step, but other than that it was a pretty simple and fun exercise. It could probably use a little UI treatment, of course - I've said a million times that I'm no designer, though I would love to be one. My screen-scraping of the census bureau's site needs some more work, too. There is a lot of javascript code for mouseover of rows, etc., in that page that should be parsed out with some regular expressions.
Also, I ran out of places to get more data. I was hoping to maybe grab more information about climate (average rainfall, average temp) and tourist information or regional facts, but nothing jumped out at me while searching. Anyone have any ideas for additional places to get more information?
Feel free to leave comments, ideas, criticisms, or your credit card number, expiration date and PIN below.
What, California not on the list? :)
I have lived in California before, the Monterey area to be exact. It is beautiful, beautiful country and the weather is fantastic. However, it is much more than an 8-hour drive from home and the cost of living (specifically housing) is way too rich for my blood. After California falls off into the ocean, I'd be willing to move to Arizona, though!