I’ve just been asked by Lee, who has started a new community website for the Great Barr, Kingstanding and Oscott areas of Birmingham The B44 Blog, ‘do you know how to set up a weather widget on the side of wordpress.com?’

The answer is yes, this is quite an easy thing to do using the RSS widget and the RSS feed from an online local weather forecast from somewhere like BBC Weather.

Full instructions on how to place an RSS feed into the sidebar of a free WordPress site are on:

• WordPress Support’s RSS Widget page
• talk about local’s guide Adding local information to your blog using RSS

So now we know how to add the RSS widget to the sidebar, all we need is the RSS feed of the local weather forecast.

I got this by going to the BCC weather page and searching for the B44 Birmingham area in the ‘find a forecast’ box.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the box in which the 5 day forecast for B44 Birmingham appears is an RSS button.

Click on this to get the URL of the RSS feed for this weather forecast, which can be copied from the browser bar and pasted into the WordPress RSS widget.

Simply copying and pasting this into the RSS widget on the WordPress dashboard means a local weather report appears in the sidebar of the site:

Nicky is the Communications Manager at Talk About Local – recruiting, training and working with IT trainers and active citizens across the UK to help them create and develop simple yet effective community websites and online profiles. Nicky is currently overseeing Talk About Local's Networking for Work project, helping jobseekers to take control of their online profiles and look their best online. Nicky managed the popular Birmingham hyperlocal website Digbeth is Good since it began in May 2008 until moving to Cardiff in December 2011, where she helps organise regular Canton Social Media Surgeries. Nicky is interested in ways of using storytelling, game-playing and events within communities to tell their stories and effect positive change.

Nicky Getgood

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