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:
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Great tip! I’ve just swapped our old image-based Google weather widget for this – it’s much cleaner using text (and more SEO friendly) and everyone trusts the BEEB’s weather forecasts….right?
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