Blimey, some people who know me know that I tend to obsess sometimes over things. In the same vein, I’ve positively gotten obsessed with the weather, obtaining latest readings, parsing them, storing them, displaying them, the works.

So yesterday I spent a significant amount of time writing a PHP program to parse the XML feed from InterceptVector. They provide a free weather feed for tons of cities worldwide in XML. They’ve been having problems though, sometimes the server is down, sometimes the data is incorrect (as I found to my surprise this morning!). So I verify their feed first, and if there is a problem I fall back to PHP Weather’s feed, which is more reliable.

Why use InterceptVector at all then? Well, they provide feeds from a lot more locations than just Heathrow and 1 or 2 other airports. Plus, they supply a 5-day forecast, which you can see by clicking on ‘More details’ on the left.