Inclement Conditions at Weather.com

I’ve noticed some oddities with the weather.com site. Ever since they rolled out what seems to be ver. 3 of their site, it’s been serving 404s on a random basis. I’ve noticed this because my weather control sends me error alerts. Instead of an XML feed with a weather forecast, weather.com sends an HTML page-not-found. Naturally, it can’t be parsed in a meaningful way, which is why an exception occurs.

This should not be a huge concern for most people because the error goes away really fast… Until the next 404. I can recommend hiding the control altogether on error conditions, if it bothers you. Just tap into the server-side Error event and set the control’s visibility to false.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to know if they changed anything on their end (http headers, for example). They neither respond to emails nor publish anything for developers. Stay tuned.