Perri Nelson's Website 

Third party services part ???

I've commented before on the use of third party services on blogging sites. I'm not going to rehash that at this time, except to say that a lot of bloggers rely on free third party services, and that sometimes those services don't work as well as we'd like. Hey, they're free and we get what we pay for right?

When the government provides a service though, we generally expect it to work. Whether it's freely provided to the public or not, our taxes pay for it. The thing is though, that there are an aweful lot of people using government services, and sometimes the capacity of those services is exceeded by the public demand.

I'm not talking about welfare, medicare, or any of those social services, although they suffer from similar problems. No, what I'm talking about is the National Weather Service's DWML service that I use to obtain forecast data. It's been intermittently up and down now for about a week.

People that go to my forecast pages, which rely on the DWML service aren't getting forecasts. Instead they're getting error pages. It's a bit irritating to me when I go to look up the local forecast this way and get the error page too.

It's also my own fault. My forecast handler isn't dealing with the possibility that the National Weather Service might have temporarily shut down access to the DWML service, so it's throwing exceptions. It takes a while to get to that point, because sometimes the service times out, sometimes it throws an "invalid gateway" error, and other times it returns a 403 "unauthorized" error. At least I know what's happening and why, because I get email for every site error.

I guess now it's time I fixed this. A few visitors to my site are trying to retrieve forecasts every now and then. I know the forecasts are failing, so I've been letting down a few of my visitors.

Ouch.

I'll have a fix up for this in a few days. I know what I need to do to fix it, and once it's fixed I'll let you know.

While I'm at it, I'm going to update the repeat visitor widget so that when the DWML service is working, and when I know where you are visiting from, it will show you a quick summary of the next 12 hours in your forecast.

Meanwhile, if there are features you'd like to see implemented, or if you encounter bugs on the site that you'd like to see fixed, please don't hesitate to send me email at perri at perrinelson dot com. Do that, and I'll see what I can do to get them fixed. After all, how can I complain about free services provided by others if I don't keep my own services up to snuff?

Update: The forecast page has been updated. Instead of presenting an error page when the weather service is unavailable it should now inform you that the service is unavailable and provide you with a link to the National Weather Service's main weather page. At the current time the ndfdXml service is offline. I will post a notice when it becomes available again.

Update 2: The ndfdXml service is back online again. Weather forecasts should once again be available.

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