Author Topic: Facebook posting of weather alerts  (Read 937 times)

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Offline SoMDWx

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Facebook posting of weather alerts
« on: April 10, 2019, 09:58:46 PM »
I know this may have been hashed over many times before, please bear with me.

Many of us use WxMesg to post weather alerts to Facebook pages. As we know this no longer works for some and others it still functions.

It only seems a matter of time before none of us will be able to post automatic generated Wx alerts to FB.

Has anyone overcome this anomaly or is this final?

I have many followers on FB ( > 9000) and I understand that latency can and is an issue for real time alerts on Facebook. I am trying to migrate to some other method/platform that makes this easy for my viewers....

Any suggestions/inputs are welcome....

Jim


Offline chief-david

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Re: Facebook posting of weather alerts
« Reply #1 on: April 10, 2019, 10:55:52 PM »
I thought IFTTT was supposed to do it. I never was able to get it to work.
Then....
I dumped my RMS facebook page. Tired of getting messages asking me why school was not cancelled.



You can't phase me-I teach Middle School.
It's not you-It's WU.

Offline K6GKM

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Re: Facebook posting of weather alerts
« Reply #2 on: June 04, 2021, 06:13:58 PM »
Forgive me for raising the dead here, but I've been using IFTTT for ages to accomplish this.  My situation is a bit more complicated than yours... I have multiple zones inside of my county.  Your setup looks much more straightforward, with the forecast zones pretty much following county lines.  You should be able to get everything you need by setting up one RSS feed >> Facebook Pages Applet for each County you wish to cover using the ATOM/CAP Alert feed link provided at https://alerts.weather.gov.  Two ways you can go from here...

- Method one is less time-consuming, but broader.  If you set the RSS feed trigger to do so on "New Feed Item," it will post whatever the item is... Watch, Warning, Advisory, Statement, even the occasional "There are no active Watches, Warnings, or Advisories" will get posted.  The county feed should include everything, short-fuse and long-fuse... but you might need to play around and tweak as you take note of missing or over-abundant posts.

- Method two is more time consuming, but allows to you to tailor the text of each alert to the Watch, Warning, or Advisory being passed along, as well as ignore any WWA's you want to ignore, if you so desire.  The drawback to this method is it involves creating a separate RSS feed Applet for each product you want to pass along (I wound up with something like 100 unique Applets).  If you choose to fire the RSS Feed trigger on "New Feed Item Matches" you'll be presented with a keyword or simple phrase search option, which you can enter in the title of the alert product you're focusing on with this particular trigger...  "Tornado Warning" or "Flash Flood Watch" and so forth.  The advantage here is that you can tailor the text surrounding the ingredient to the product you're posting.  For example, my Wind Advisory Applet adds "CamWX ALERT - " before the EntryContent, while my Flash Flood Warning Applet adds "CamWX EMERGENCY ALERT - to the head of it.  I also add the general call-to-action for each WWA to the tail end due to the truncation issue described below.

With either method you choose, once you get to the Action step of the Applet, you'll chose which "Ingredients" to include with your post.  You can choose to post just the EntryTitle of the RSS feed entry...
E.g. - "Wind Advisory issued May 21 at 1:36PM PDT until May 21 at 9:00PM PDT by NWS"

...or you can choose to post the EntryContent of the RSS Feed entry.
E.g.-
"...WIND ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 9 PM PDT THIS EVENING... * WHAT...West winds 15 to 25 mph with gusts to 40 mph expected. * WHERE...Coastal areas of Ventura and Los Angeles Counties. * WHEN...Until 9 PM PDT this evening. * IMPACTS...Gusty winds will blow around unsecured objects and make driving difficult, especially for high profile vehicles."  It's important to note that IFTTT will nearly always truncate the text of the EntryContent, resulting in a hard stop mid-sentence.

Ok... time for the disadvantages of using IFTTT.  With a standard Free account, RSS feeds are only checked for changes every 30 minutes.  The latency here is obviously a huge problem, so I opted to subscribe to a Pro account, which does checks of RSS feeds every 5 minutes.  The Pro subscription is just $3.99/month, well worth the investment, I think.

Them's the nuts and bolts of it... if you have any questions or want to take a closer look at my IFTTT configurations, let me know.

Thanks,
« Last Edit: June 07, 2021, 03:45:05 PM by K6GKM »
Grant Miles
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Offline W Thomas

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Re: Facebook posting of weather alerts
« Reply #3 on: February 15, 2022, 01:17:31 AM »
I would be interested in learning how your particular setup works I have tried IFTTT before and using it currently for Weather Cloud but I have never been able to get it to post to Facebook in any form or fashion.

Thanks


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