Since my last post on our all out assault on local, it seems like I’ve gone AWOL.

Alas, between a quick trip to Houston and focusing on such said assault, it is hard to get a break. Stuck staring at a computer screen for upto 16 hours a day, spending even more time makes me dizzy.

I had missed over something when I had talked about local - weather. Our most requested feature on weather. So after my latest blog post, we got another two requests in one day for weather.

It was time to do something about it.

So (while running everything else), we heavily pressed on weather. Turns out the US Government provides weather information, as does the Canadian Government (but not nearly as openly). Problem is that relying on the government for an XML service is dangerous - their servers are notorious for flaking out at any given time. So we pressed for enterprise solutions to weather delivery.

In under 10 days, we have a fully functioning weather site: iBegin Weather. It is 99% done - the caching element is still a work in progress (right now we fetch data ‘live’ - the updated version will automatically do that every 20 minutes). The site design is ripped straight from iBegin Source - keeping with our simple/clean/quick loading motif. We even have a nice widget for spreading weather. Example: Share San Francisco, CA Weather.

Again - underlines the versatility a larger company can have. Our illustrator did the icons and other misc graphics (roughly 100). Our JS/PHP guy did the widget. Another programmer focused on the primary engine. Data-provider gave us easy to use CSV files that make data manipulation easy. Our geocoding abilities let us figure out spatial distances that would have cost a pretty penny. And previous experience with sites like iBegin let us churn out an intelligent structure, XML feeds, and even try to guess where the user is from.

We should have the site 100% by Tuesday morning (and thus our ‘launch’). We should be in the rest of the world (~15,000 locations outside of the US) in 4-6 weeks.