Can anyone recommend a good, 'trusted' source of data on ski area info once the season is up and running - looking for things like number of lifts, runs open etc. that could be accessed by an app for a personal project?

I understand from the android app conversation there used to be an rss feed from visitscotland - is this still active?

Thanks,
Simon



Edited 1 times. Last edit at 22.05hrs Wed 14 Sep 16 by GlenlivetGuy.

You can't do better than right here on Winterhighland. Reports, webcams, lift status, weather, all in one place. They also have an Android App which gives you access to all the information in a data light format, so it's accessible in poor signal areas.

This site is the best for piste action.

For off piste, various Facebook pages are excellent supplemented by this site and others.

Thanks all for the replies - I'm actually looking to do something similar to the Android app. The plan is for it to initially be just personal use, but it's possible other people might use it so I'm not sure scraping the data from the site would be appreciated?

Thanks,
Simon

Big Al fae the north has quite a reputation, Inverness has been twinned wi Saudi Arabia cause of the big yins strict enforcement...

These apps could do wi a dibble alert. I'm pretty sure some webcams could be set up watching the roads in and oot of the resorts, using bacon recognition tae warn others that it's time tae hide the doob...

Hi Simon

I just re-checked the VisitScotland RSS feeds and they are still very broken, none of them is showing any resort data at all. The links are still available on the Visitscotland report pages and i'd like to think they will be fixed in time for next season. In previous years, the RSS feeds would always continue to work during the summer even if all they do is tell you everything is closed.

I did report the problem to VisitScotland when the RSS first broke, but I got the impression my message went into a black hole. Perhaps Igloo4You could pester them for us if he sees this thread.

tim1mw,

Think you might be looking at the old ski scotland website. New Ski Scotland website at [www.visitscotland.com] is updating fine.

Unfortunately that's the one I'm looking at. The main page is fine, it's the RSS feed that's broken. Try clicking the "Link to RSS feed" link on this page and you'll see what I mean. Right now it just gives some generic visit Scotland info, no resort information at all. It's been that way for months now, I think it packed up back in January or February. This used to show the same report data as the normal report page but without all of the navigation and styling.

Note, this won't affect Glencoe reports on the Android app, they never came from the VisitScotland RSS feed which was only ever used for Cairngorm.



Edited 1 times. Last edit at 18.52hrs Sun 16 Oct 16 by tim1mw.

An update on the VisitScotland RSS feeds. It would seem that they have decided to fix the problem by removing all the links, so I'm guessing that particular source of report data is no more.

Thanks for the update - I suspect for the time being, I'm going to end up scraping the pages for the individual sites.

There is currently no way of getting a properly formatted feed for CairnGorm as CML unilaterally left the shared national reporting system and as you can see haven't updated even the Ski Scotland page since May.

More often than not last year we had to manually update the CairnGorm report because they were so tardy with updating the Ski Scotland feed. Since they think their better than using the shared system we're inclined not to bother this season.

We're still waiting for messers Gough or Kearny to get back about turning on the Winterhighland Ptamigsn webcam for LAST season. As lots of people will attest, emails are never answered, phone never picked up and voice mails never acknowledged!

Oh and Winterhighland got banned from sharing,liking, tagging or commentating on CML Facebook for confirming to a customer that asked if the Ciste Gully was still complete. They're question got deleted too! Funny how their quick enough with the delete button!

Pretty bad when a reaper can't help their customers to see what's open or not. Sure a lot of people who ski in Scotland check the cams on pages like this or check through means of Facebook etc.