Microsummaries

Microsummaries are a fun little addition to the upcoming Firefox 2.0 (and currently in the Beta 1 release). Basically, your bookmark titles can update automatically to give you a quick view of what’s happening on the site. As an example (and my first generator), check out this screen shot of the current weather conditions in Tupelo, MS:

Dang, it’s hot… and I just had to glance at my bookmarks toolbar to know that These microsummaries are very flexible, they can be specified by site owners or generated by user xml files. This lousy blog will surely have microsummary goodness soon enough.

To get your weather, add the current weather observation microsummary generator, bookmark the appropriate XML file (not RSS) from http://www.weather.gov/data/current_obs/, go to the bookmarks properties and check out the drop down box for the title. Ideally, this would work with the more human readable weather page instead of the xml feed, but I didn’t feel like figuring out the XPaths to the pieces of data I needed, I’ll leave that to someone else… or maybe I’ll do it later.

As a side note, this firefox beta crashed 3 times while writing this post, but the new session restore feature brought me back almost exactly where I was… thanks to having saved periodically. Also during the course of writing this, my bookmark title changed to ’96 F – Fair’… I thought it was late enough to be cooling off

Update: Here’s a generator for google weather (change the zip code in the url, if you actually use their form, the url will no longer match).