World and Travel

More of Darwin

Posted in Arts and Culture, Code and machines, World and Travel on January 16th, 2011 by admin – Be the first to comment

I thought it about time I started using the Facebook page I’d setup for The Beagle Voyage some time ago. I I created a Facebook Application which uses oAuth to post the same content as the Tweets at  @cdarwin to Facebook as status updates. Why not go there and Like the page. In time I daresay I’ll be able to post more content than I do on Twitter.

My pre-holiday newsletter

Posted in World and Travel on July 1st, 2009 by admin – Be the first to comment

To make the most of the run-up to our holiday I knocked together a simple newsletter that aggregates various sources of information.

So, the weather information I’m pulling from Google RSS feeds
(eg: http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather=Portland,Oregon).

Photos of the area, I’m pulling from Flickr – for example,
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=Oregon,Landscape

News feeds are being pulled from a variety of sources – one, for example, is the The Montana Standard (RSS for the local area news at http://www.mtstandard.com/?rss=area).

And, of grim fascination, the exchange rate for Sterling to the Dollar is being scraped from a simple Google query.

The whole lot is compiled using a cron job once a day, and a prettified email  including a dynamically generated countdown image is sent to me and my partner, Helen.  The finished thing looks something like this: