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Archive for June, 2011

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

Hand drawn weather icons

Hand drawn weather icons

Hand drawn weather icons

Latest icon set available now from the store. The perfect accompaniment for hand-drawn fonts like ‘Pointy’, ‘Handvetica’, ‘Grutch Shaded’, ‘Sketch Block’ etc – these hand-sketched weather icons come in 4 different sizes, in coloured and outline versions, all in PNG format with transparency. Included as a free bonus is Weather Sketched Regular – a Truetype font containing all 32 icons – lowercase gives you the weather symbols, and the first 8 uppercase characters give you the eight directional wind arrows.

This set now includes text icons for ‘Hot’ and ‘Cold’ plus a new pictorial icon for ‘windy’ – so they can now easily be used in conjunction with the Yahoo! Weather API, and similar weather data providers.
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Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

Weather Widget Revisited

Wordpress Weather Widget v 2.0

My Wordpress Weather Widget v 2.0

I have just put the finishes touches on my latest attempt at a Local Weather Widget for Wordpress, this time branded in Leitrim colours.

I first had a stab at this kind of thing a couple of years ago but removed it when it broke the blog completely…! This new version seems a bit more stable, but still suffers from missing data from the Yahoo! Weather feed, especially overnight. Also, and here’s the problem, it’s still hard coded into a text widget, which isn’t exactly ideal. You should be able to see the real thing at the bottom of the sidebar on the right… (UPDATE : I’ve just turned the weather widget off – it should be back once I’ve worked out how to make it not quite so easy to download a free set of my weather icons..!)

So if there are any bored PHP / Wordpress experts out there who’d be interested in a collaboration, please do get in touch. It’d be nice to make this into a proper Irish Local Weather widget downloadable from wordpress.org/extend, with options in the admin page to select your county branding, your town or city (or long-lat?), and choose from current, 1 day or 2 day forecasts or combinations.

As before, the XML parsing and CSS classes are based on those by Marco Voegeli. The data is currently coming from Yahoo!Weather, but I’m in the process of investigating the free weather API from World Weather Online – they offer a longer-range forecast, and they’re also using my weather icons!

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

Realistic Weather Icons

Your Window on the Weather

Your Window on the Weather

Here’s a sneak peek at a brand new set of ‘realistic’ weather icons’ ideal for websites or apps.

A complete set of 40 different weather types (including night-time versions) each framed inside a recessed window that also reflects the type of weather ‘outside’ by way of various lighting effects ‘inside’. The weather views themselves are opaque, but the surrounding border has varying levels of PNG transparency – basically it means that these icons will work beautifully no matter what colour background they are placed on.

I’ve called this set ‘Window on the Weather’ – and like the traditional weather symbols sets, it’s royalty free for personal and commercial use.

By the way, if you’re looking for a free Weather API so you can build your own weather application, you could try World Weather Online, who supply worldwide weather and XML/JSON/CSV weather data feed via. their Weather API. They are also, incidentally, currently using my ‘TV-style’ weather symbols on their site right now!

To learn more about the ‘Window on the Weather’ Icon Set – click the image below…

weather icons for websites