Making do
In the spirit of playfulness, DIY culture and ‘Making do’ I wondered last night what I could do with Eric Morecambe and his statue on Morecambe’s sea front. The joy that this statue brings to people is a wonder to see by the way – there’s always smiles and laughter around him. What to do though? Well, he’s sat out on the sea front 24 hours a day / 365 days a year so he clearly sees a lot of weather. So the obvious thing to do is let him have his say about it – find a suitable weather API (after playing with wunderground and google, I finally settled on yahoo), parse the weather data into a string, use the weather condition codes to generate comments, then send Eric’s thoughts on their way to the world via an automated tweet twice a day. Quite a fun thing to do with just an API, some PHP and a cron job. Feel free to follow Eric’s weather at www.twitter.com/ericsstatue 
