Weather forecast in the Gnome panel
12:04am, Saturday 1 August 2009
It's annoyed me for some time that the standard Gnome weather
applet doesn't display forecasts for the UK (it's a long-standing
bug). So I scratched the itch.
Given that I'd be hacking something together in Perl, the
Gnome2::PanelApplet module seemed like a good place to
start. It didn't take long to get something that mostly worked. But,
er, either I'm doing something wrong or there
are still some lurking bugs; my applet wouldn't add properly from
the Gnome menu, only if I started it from the command line first.
So I resorted to gnome-swallow-applet
which is a clever (but revolting) hack to "swallow" any X window into
the panel, and wrote a script to parse the BBC's weather RSS feeds and display icons for the upcoming days. This is what it looks like. You can download the script;
change the feed URL for your location, and enjoy. If
you fix any of the bits labelled FIXME please send me a patch!
![[RSS]](gfx/rss.png)