Update: I’ve made Twitter Weather, an easy to use site where you put in your twitter username/password, the zip code you want weather for, and the time to publish it.

I’ve just started using Twitter (add me as a friend) and it’s great! The first thing I wanted when I joined was to get daily weather reports at 7 AM, so I wrote a silly PHP script to do it, the source code to which you can see below (apologies if the formatting is bad):

<?php
$uname = ‘nyc_weather’;
$pwd = ‘ThePassWordHere’;
$twitter_url = ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml’;
$feed = ‘http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=USNY0996&u=f’;
error_reporting(E_ALL);
// <yweather:forecast day=”Thu”…
$data = file_get_contents($feed);
preg_match(‘`<yweather:forecast day=”(.*?)” date=”(.*?)” low=”(.*?)” high=”(.*?)” text=”(.*?)”[^>]*>`si’, $data, $w);
// make the status
$status = urlencode(“The forecast for $w[1], $w[2] is $w[5]. High: $w[4] F Low: $w[3] F.”);
//just for status if you are directly viewing the script
echo $status;
// send it off
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_URL,“$twitter_url”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_POST,1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS,“status=$status”);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_USERPWD,“$uname:$pwd”);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
if (empty($buffer)){echo ‘<br/>message’;}else{echo ‘<br/>success’;}?>

Then you just work a little crontab magic:

[root@fc435152 twitter]# crontab -l
0 7 * * * php /home/twitter/twitter-weather.php

And every day I get a Twitter message on the nyc_weather user (you can subscribe too if you’re from NY) like this:

The forecast for Wed, 04 Apr 2007 is Rain/Thunder. High: 46 F Low: 38 F.

I’m thinking of making a more generic service where you give my server your user, password, location, and time of day, and every day at that time (normalize to the local regional time of course) it will try to send the twitter update. I’d want to bake in retry, so it will keep retrying the old twitters. That’s a 1-2 day project, we’ll see.

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