From 95f80efabcb75b8bb3fc51673cfefc7f66778cbc Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: lucidiot Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2024 20:54:51 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] Post about EnviroFlash --- feed.xml | 29 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 29 insertions(+) diff --git a/feed.xml b/feed.xml index e04730b..366ffde 100644 --- a/feed.xml +++ b/feed.xml @@ -2460,6 +2460,35 @@ $ printf hunter2 | md5sum 0.42 If you can read this, then RSRSSS is definitely working. + + + EnviroFlash + + enviroflash + OPML + Air quality + CAP + https://envs.net/~lucidiot/rsrsss/opml/enviroflash.opml + Because the United States is a combination of all the bad things about the European Union and the bad things about a single country, anything that involves the federal government is a mess. AirNow is a demonstration of that mess, as a partnership between the EPA and a whole lot of other entites that provide air quality information, which are such a mess they are just better described (and sometimes officially described) as local partners. They provide three different services:

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  • AirNow-Tech is the platform where air quality data is sent, and where it can also be extracted, analyzed, used by partners (not just local partners).
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  • AirNow API provides APIs, data exports, etc. from AirNow-Tech. It requires a registration like AirNow-Tech, but this time anyone can register and get approved. The data exports are Atom feeds, but I am not including them since they are hidden behind that registration wall. To me, open data is not open if you have to register!
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  • EnviroFlash provides e-mail notifications for current air quality conditions, forecasts, and warnings to the general public. They also serve RSS feeds, as well as Atom feeds including CAP messages.
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Since EnviroFlash is the only truly open website of the list, this will be the one I am featuring here. The feeds page provides an Atom feed that aggregates all of the CAP messages nationwide, and lets you select a state. Selecting a state and submitting the form triggers a script that uses AJAX to display a table of all the feeds available for that state.

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Some states, like Alaska, have zero cities listed; in total, only 44 states have some feeds available. Each feed is specific to a city, and there are five different feeds for each city:

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I wrote an XQuery script that lists all of the RSS and Atom feeds as well as the CAP alerts for all cities in all states, resulting in more than 3000 links, in one OPML file. If you need to do some load testing on your feedreader, now you know what to use!

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EnviroFlash has made me discover CAP, the Common Alerting Protocol, a standard that I will look into in more detail in the future and that is designed to make emergency alerts more interoperable. I have already started to look into other sources of CAP alerts to learn by example.

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