Given the recent burst of cyclones in Australia the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) has been posting a lot of severe weather warnings.

Unfortunately BOM doesn’t have an RSS feed… In fact when e-mailing their webmaster I have been informed that they don’t intend to.

Because of this I am providing my own RSS feeds for the website (as I promised in my first ever post on this website). I have created RSS feeds for each state, click the relevant link to view the RSS feed relevant to you: Northern Territory, ACT, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales.

This most resent version of this script uses CURL. Anyone who would like to put this script on their website that is with Dreamhost should use this version of the script. You can download this version by clicking here.

There is also an older version of the script that you can download by clicking here.

Please note that if using the older version of the script you will need to enable the following in your php.ini:

allow_url_fopen = On

This will allow URL file-access in your PHP configuration so the script can run. If you don’t enable this then you will receive an error along the lines of:

No input file specified.

In case you are wondering how this was done I used the following procedure:

1. Read HTML content of the page (with forecasts for the state)

2. Parse the page using regexps - extract links to the news articles

3. Parse each page and extract title and date of publication

4. Format the data in RSS format

Digg This

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 2:31 pm and is filed under PHP Programming, Source Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.