The ridiculously productive Ben Hammersley is proposing a LazyWeb (that was one of his) project: personalised weather forecasts delivered to your MP3 player from some (probably) XML-based source of weather information on the web, via a text-to-speech convertor to a podcast.
I’m not sure about the text-to-speech bit. Perhaps a wristwatch would be a better device. Then again, I haven’t got into the habit of carrying around an iPod all the time yet but anyway I presume my wristwatch will be an MP3 player shortly.
Ben’s a bit of PERL fiend so he probably wouldn’t be keen on a PHP solution. I’m thinking here of a previous post about consuming RSS weather feeds with PHP. It wouldn’t be too difficult to add a geographic location selector and deliver the personalised feed through to some existing text-to-speech engine but then the problem is, who would want to host the service? Same with lots of podcasting ideas, it will eat bandwidth.
Maybe I’ll use the idea to start to teach myself PERL. I’ve assumed for years that it’s legacy stuff and wouldn’t be around much longer - the COBOL of server-side scripting - but it’s still going strong. PERL or Python? Pythonor PERL? Or both?
