Pollen Forecast on Twitter

I recently attended a hackday event with Dale. Mashed2008 was my first, and it certainly will not be my last. We hacked together a current cost idea, and won! However that was not this hack. On the train on the way in I was discussing some simple hacks with @thomasj. One issue I have is that my hayfever is very up and down, and the bbc pollen forecast seems to be quite good at being ‘High’ when I want to rip my eyes out, and ‘Low’ when I can get away with not eating ant-histamines like smarties.

So using the power of twitter (when it is not down), and a simple perl script to get the data from the page and I now have @pollen_south which gives me the south feed. If I get requests I might add the other areas that the bbc use, but as a simple hack it work pretty well. The only downside was that I totally forgot about doing the hack until the point during the presentations when I slowly lost the will to live.