<div dir="ltr">I know i havent been to active round here recently (been really busy, sorry :-( ) but one thing that i have noticed on the mailing lists that really interested me is the widgets ideas. IMO these are really key things that, shouldnt :-p, be too hard to implement. Ive had a brief look at one of the widgets which i look for alot, which is weather (although i dont know why, it always seems to be rain :-p)<br>
<br>NWS / NOAA provide an XML output of weather for all US cities and most international cities, and with it being a US gov org all its content is therefore PD and totally free to use and copy etc (not a lawyer though). this we could then implement easily using a JS call from the search var, with or without looking for a "weather: XXX" keyword and then output next to the search results, maybe below the adverts. this could also be JS implemented to be hide able etc with more widgets....... the problem with NOAA IMO is that it requires calls to use lat/long co-ordinates for the calls, thus required more geo-location stuff which makes this harder and harder.<br>
<br>so then i looked for alternative APIs which could be used and came up with <a href="http://weather.com">weather.com</a>'s feed. this requires registration, but is then free to use but requires 5 links back and a logo, which may or maynot be acceptable to us?? this however does give the ease of being able to call by city name, removing the need for geo-locations stuff.<br>
<br>however the balance needs to come between coding and technical possibility and the "freeness" of the content.<br><br>also im guessing there are many different ideas for widgets so also please feel free to give thoughts on this one, and any others that spring to mind as being wanted. my thoughts were: Open Street Map contents when searching locations (ie a map of the location in the world/country/are when searching for a city) or cinema times for jimbo etc etc<br>
<br>regards (and apologies for the lengthy message)<br><br>mark<br></div>