Wii Daily Update
What is Wii Daily Update?
Being disappointed that the News and Weather Channels weren't available at launch, I set up a simple script on the site to pull some news & weather news feeds and send them to the Wii via e-mail.
The result is a summary in text: local weather from Yahoo, Google US News, and Google World News pulled from RSS feeds available on their respective sites.
How do I get in on this action?
I don't have a mass-mailer at my disposal, so you're gonna have to do a little bit more work than normal. Before you get started, you should do a quick read-up on Windows Scheduled Tasks. If you're using Linux or a Mac, then you're on your own, but you should be able to do something similar using cron and wget.
The first step ... add daily_wii[at]pie2k.com to your Wii's address book (but of course, replace [at] with @). You should automatically receive a response, thereby establishing a path for communications. Do not send e-mail to this address. It is ONLY an auto-responder, nobody will read what you send there.
Once you receive your reply, you can move onto the next step ... setting up a scheduled task. Follow the steps from the site linked above. Pick how often you want to receive your updates (for me, daily at 6:30 AM so it's ready when I wake up), and enter the command line in the "Run" box. The command line is as follows:
"%ProgramFiles%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://mpierce.pie2k.com/rss_aggregator/wii_text.php?Zip=YourZipCode&WiiNum=YourWiiNumber
You'll want to copy & paste the above line directly, and then replace YourZipCode with your 5-digit zip code and YourWiiNumber with your wii's number.
If you're adventurous, you could use wget instead of Internet Explorer. The upside is you won't have a window of diagnostic text to close afterward like you do with IE. The downside is that since you can install wget anywhere, I can't give you a simple copy & paste command line. If you're comfortable with scheduled tasks and command lines, it's actually pretty simple, though.
And that's pretty much it. Once a day, your computer will access the page, which will in turn e-mail your local weather, world news, and US news to your wii.
It's not working. Can you help me?
No... this isn't exactly something I'm supporting. The Wii Weather Channel will be up by the end of the month, and News sometime next month. The scheduling is up to you, because the hassle of getting it done on the web server with my hosting company isn't worth it for a program that will last a month at the very most.
Nevertheless ... enjoy!