Elders Weather - Facebook

Elders contacted us regarding an idea they had by building on their already very popular Elders Weather service they provide. Elders Weather is one of Australia's most visited sites across all categories and Elders' idea was to build on that and combine it with another large userbase - that being from Facebook.

The challenge

The requirements were to use the data from Elders Weather and allow Facebook users to add any number of locations to their Facebook profile to receive forecast information for those locations. The idea being - login to Facebook as per usual and you can see what the upcoming temperature and conditions are going to be. Want more information? Easy, just click the link and you're taken to the detail page on the Elders Weather website.

The other idea was that you can add locations of your friends - a great conversation point or just nice to know what's happening on the other side of the world.

The technical

Our primary goal was to find a scaleable way of migrating data from one source to another - in this case, from the Elders Weather feed (XML) and use Facebook's API to present that information in a useful way. The other challenge was to find a way of storing Facebook user's preferences, locations and so-on in yet another source - the primary Elders database.

We ended up building:

an interface to search & request data from Elders Weather for specific locations
an extension to Facebook's API to allow for the transfer of data
an API back to Elders' database for the storing of information and read/write of that data