Corrected: Pick your weather service

A commenter pointed out that some stray quotes in my code caused a bunch of my post to vanish and it looked like I called Weather Underground immoral slime. Quite the contrary. This should be the corrected text.

I've told you about my hate on for Walmart. I've probably mentioned my hate for Amazon.com a time or twelve. Now I'm gonna prattle on about the weather services.

First there's NOAA. I actually have no problem with NOAA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the US government's weather monitoring and forecasting service. You can get quick rundowns for your area at http://www.weather.gov/ without fees or advertising. Dig around in their site and you can find unprocessed data that you can use when writing your own little weather app. Their site may fail to update a bit more often than the other weather sites, but it's still a pretty useful and reliable site.

That's in contrast with the more commonly used Accuweather service. My phone came with an Accuweather widget that I promptly removed. When staying in hotels it's usually an Accuweather printout I see hanging in the elevator. Sometimes I see them used for television weather prediction. I see their stuff used all over the place. They're a weather prediction company and make money from their predictions.

Accuweather was also a major contributor to former Senator Rick "anal scum" Santorum in exchange for him pushing bills that would make it illegal for NOAA to make their predictions publicly available. They pressured employees to make contributions to him as well. Obviously the muzzling of NOAA would increase business for Accuweather. I'm happy to say that the rest of Congress was happy to laugh at and reject Santorum's bill. It got no cosponsors and never went up for a vote.

I'm not sure which I hate more. The fact that they're trying to silence NOAA or the fact that they would fund immoral slime like Santorum.

Weather.com is the Weather Channel's website. I don't see nearly as many apps for them as I do for Accuweather. They too contributed to Santorum, but nowhere near as much as Accuweather. I can't back it up, but at the time they seemed ashamed to be making the donation. I don't boycott them, but they're not my preferred service.

The fourth service is Weather Underground [http://www.wunderground.com/]. I've never heard anything bad about them. It used to look much like some geeks with an interest in weather data running a website. They're looking more professional now. They give more information than I tend to see on the other sites as well as an archive of past weather going back years.

Like Weather.com their service tends to drop from time to time. I use the "Weather Forecast Widget" on my phone which allows me to pick from Google, NOAA, and Weather Underground forecast data. I've got it set for Weather Underground. Sometimes it goes blank for awhile. Their trip planner I find quite useful.

And they give you this little app for your website.