We’ve just reached 100 users on the Blaccu Weather Report Facebook App! How cool is that? I honestly didn’t think anyone would use it when I made it, so it’s really cool that people are actually adding it. Thanks guys!
In other news, I’ve set up an RSS feed for this blog, incase any of you out there are interested enough to keep up with what’s going on. You can view the feed either by using the RSS icon at the top of the Blog pages, or by clicking here.

I’ve made the facebook app – you can sign up to it here. It’s pretty basic at the moment, and I need to do a lot of research into how to get the weather to properly update on the profile page, but it works alright for now. The main issue is with automatic updates on the profile page. As far as I can see, there are two main options: 1. Flash – however this requires you to click the ‘click to play’ image before it begins to load 2. Ajax – however I don’t think they let you call an Ajax request when it loads, so it has to be triggered. Hopefully there is a way around it on the Ajax front. If not it’s quite disappointing – I’m sure FB would have their reasons for disallowing this, but it is very disabling for those of us developing apps that really need the info on the profile page to be dynamic. There is much reasearch to be done here, methinks.

I’ve just spent some time re-doing the Blaccu Weather Report. It now uses the Google Weather API (details of which can be found here), which, although is much neater than the Yahoo! one, doesn’t have a defined set of return states, which made generating the Oli phrases a tad more difficult. I’ve gone by the icon it returns, and unfortunately cannot find a directory listing for the icons directory, so will have to hope I’ve got them all! I’ll be keeping an eye out for other icons that I’ve missed, but hopefully there won’t be many. As well as that, it now attempts to guess your location using the NetGeo Database, which is very cool, but could do with turning the result of the queries into a nice XML or JSON format. Apparently there’s a Pear package that does this querying for you (quite why, since it’s just an HTTP GET request and then some minor parsing, I don’t know), which I suppose might be a nice thing to look into if you’re planning on using this for anything more substantial. And now, to plan the Facebook app!

A year ago (almost to the day, I think) I built the Blaccu Weather Report for a laugh. I looked at its analytics today, and although it’s not getting much traffic, it turns out that it’s number 1 on Google for “oli williams family guy”, and is on the first page when you search for “oli williams” by itself. I think this is pretty cool! As a result I hope to dedicate a bit of time to the site, make it a bit better. Probably make a Facebook app – everything has a Facebook app these days.