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How to send a daily weather forecast to RTM to help schedule outdoor tasks

pachela says:
I was reading this thread about possible RTM and IFTTT integration and thought I'd share a way I'm currently using IFTTT to help with my daily RTM decision making.

Last summer my problem looked like this: I would decide not to mow the lawn because it didn't really need it yet, but I had missed the weather forecast that would have warned me that it was going to rains for days. By the time I was able to mow, a brand new ecosystem had taken hold. For whatever reason, I just couldn't seem to get in the habit of checking the weather forecast every day.

This year's solution: I set up an IFTTT "recipe" so that it's Weather channel triggers an action every morning at 6:30am. The action is to send an email (via gmail, another IFTTT channel) to my RTM inbox. I formatted the subject line of the email like a RTM Smart Add. It looks like this (everything in the dbl brackets is provided by IFTTT's Weather trigger.):

**Forecast today: {{TodaysCondition}}. Temp {{LowTempFahrenheit}}°F to {{HighTempFahrenheit}}°F. Pollen count: {{PollenCount}} ^today #*mylist #mytags !1 http://m.weather.com/10day/myzipcode

I also formatted the body of the email with additional weather information supplied by the IFTTT Weather channel (humidity, UV index, more).

Every morning this appears as a task on my Today smart list. Because I set priority to 1, it sorts to the top and I can see today's forecast at a glance or click on the url for the 10 day forecast. Now I know if I can safely postpone any weather dependent tasks. The pollen count tells me if it's going to be a bad day for allergies (and I might want to increase my allergy meds before I mow that lawn).

Once I've referenced the forecast, I just delete it, but I can imagine some folks might want to mark it as complete and maintain a daily log of weather data.
Posted at 6:58pm on April 24, 2013
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