The Geeky Junkyard of kingler

I was looking for a weather plugin for WordPress for the past several days, and found the following ones:

• Weather Icon 2 from Jeremiah is a well-designed plugin for WordPress based on “My Weather” module for Mamboserver, which pulls updates from National Weather Service. It comes with an admin interface and multi-language support.
• Weather Report 2.2 is another plugin based on the National Weather Service data. It is highly customizable, since it will only output text. But we like icons, don’t we?
• Lastly but not least, GetWeather written by Jeff (the author of WP-ShortStat Plugin) is a simple plugin to get weather updates from weather.com. This plugin can actually show more information than the Weather Icon 2 plugin, like current time, daily high/low temperature. Addiontionally, you can download more weather iconsets from the web, just do a search for “weather iconsets” (try this).

I like the simple feature of GetWeather, and recommend it to blog pros, because it may need a bit of hacking into the PHP code to get the effects you want. But if you just want an easy way to set up a weather information on your blog site, use Weather Icon 2 instead. It is really easy to install and configure.
In order to set up the plugin to show your local weather, you’ll need a city code:

• For Weather Icon 2, visit the city list and do a search.
• For GetWeather, you can use zip code if you are in the U.S. , for other locations, go to weather.com and search for your city. On the URL, you can find the a code looks like this : CHXX0116 (Shanghai, China).

Last note:
Because the old-fashioned Microsoft IE has some issues handling the alpha transparancy in PNG images (here is a good discussion), you may want to use GIF files to support IE users. Weather Icon 2 comes with the option of using GIF iconsets instead of the default PNG images, so if you have issues with the transparancy in IE, try using the GIF iconsets. GetWeather uses PNG images, and tries to overcome the IE issue by adding a alphaTransparancy filter in the CSS style, but if it doesn’t work for you, you’ll need to spend a lot more time hacking around…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Useful Tips, WebDesign. 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.