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London Underground Tube Delays in RSS!

Published December 29, 2004 by Ben

I’ve finally got round to building an RSS feed of delays on the London Underground.

The data is coming straight off the official TfL website, so hopefully there should be as little latency as possible. I was going to parse either the BBC page or the TfL PDA/Wap site (which is powered by a 3rd party, Kizoom), but this would have introduced an unnecessary middleman and further delay the timeliness of the data.

This feed only deals with “current” delays, as defined by TfL. Long-term problems, scheduled engineering works and announcements of reduced facailities at stations are not included.

I?ve set the title element to hold just the name of the tube line disrupted and the description element to hold the delay information. All RSS items link to the official TfL site directly for confirmation of the delay.

Using the feed

I think it works great in a newsreader. If you are going to add it to yous, I suggest setting it to flush the channel every time so that you only see the current delays. (For the sake of my server, please don’t poll the feed more than once or twice an hour!)

Firefox users can add the feed as a handy live bookmark?

Tube Delays live bookmark in Firefox

The easiest way of doing this is following the instructions from the Firefox Documentation, or from Firefox detecting the feed in the <head> of the Lab page.

Please let me know if you use this feed in an application or website (I think a desktop alert app similar to the BBC News one, and a Mobile/PDA site (that’s better than the TfL one) would be a great start).

Published in News Tools Uncategorized Web Services

4 Comments

  1. nick nick

    IS this live, when i asked firefox to read it it said that it couldn’t load it. *shrug*

    January 9, 2005
  2. Anonymous Anonymous

    Nick,

    Yes, this does work. When there are no tube delays no elements are created – firefox perceives this as a loading issue.

    I could create a single element called “No Delays” but that will then mess up news readers.

    January 9, 2005
  3. Andrew Andrew

    For me this is only showing access and elevator problems, and no big problems, despite there being big problems on 2 lines at TfL site.

    March 17, 2005

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