Weather Warnings on Your Desktop

When you listen to the radio or watch broadcast television you are notified when there is a weather advisory from the National Weather Service. But if you work on the computer all day, and you listen to digital music instead of the radio, there is no easy way to catch those same warnings.

Ideally, someone would create an application that could notify you of a warning or advisory in your area. Until something is available, you can check this information by combining the National Weather Service's RSS feeds and a RSS widget.

Step 1: Find your feed URL

Visit the National Weather Service's RSS feed page, drill down to your state and county, and copy the URL of the feed.

Step 2: Install a Widget

If you use OS X you can use the RSS Reader dashboard widget. Windows users can try a Yahoo! widget by the same name. After installing your widget, paste the feed URL into the widget's control panel, and choose how often you'd like the widget to update the feed.

The results look messy, but the information specific to your area is in there. It appears that there are two OS X shareware apps to track weather, but nothing as simple as a dock notification for warnings and advisories.

RSS Anywhere

I think I've found the perfect solution for reading RSS feeds:
NewsGator + NetNewsWire Lite

This combination allows you to read and store your RSS subscriptions online using the NewsGator service, but also sync those subscriptions with a desktop application. It also syncs which entries you've read in each feed.

The main advatage to this is that you can read your feeds from multiple computers without having to duplicate your list of feeds or loose track of which items you've already read.

Of course you can always purchase the full version of NetNewsWire, which has a built-in Web browser, or purchase FeedDemon for the PC.