Is this possible for a newb to design?

I am inclined to do a small project with my limited knowledge. Was referred here by a friend and was wondering if someone can guide me in the right direction.

The following is the concept of what i want to create.

Website A: my website
Website B: a weather reporting website

I want A to read text from B and turn into colour.

For example:

Website A has a picture of the state of New York.
Website B gets refreshed weather information every 5 minutes. For arguments sake, the website B text changes in two variations: "Today is hot" or "Today is cold"

I'd like for website A to be linked to website B and read the text after each time website B is refreshed and then change the colour of the image on website A.

If website B has "Today is cold", i want website A to read that and change the colour of the state to blue, if website B has "Today is hot", i want the colour of the state on website A to change to red.

From my understanding, i have to use flash to create the image of the state as a swf file and implement a script "IF" statements in it.

Can someone give me a brief overview of what i am upagainst and how difficult this is? Also, if there are some tutorials on this, i'd appreciate any sort of information.

Thanks.

Do you have any flash (actionscript) experience at all?

Is there a reason for two completely different websites?

You have several XML options of reading options of one website to another.

Do you know any server-side languages? I'd use PHP personally....

HTTP is stateless so once the page is downloaded on a person cpu it doesn't change the content....if you want to do so you'd have to use some thats asynchronous. Which you could use Flash or AJAX.

Ok from what I understand you basically are talking about making a widget for your website ,something like Yahoo Weather (http://widgets.yahoo.com/widgets/yahoo-weather).

Here is an example of a feed which you would need to learn how to parse (Weather.com (http://rss.weather.com/weather/rss/local/60001?cm_ven=LWO&cm_cat=rss&par=LWO_rss)). This means the data for the current weather is stored in an xml file which some places let you download from their site. So you would need to first learn how to import xml data into flash. There are many tutorials out there for that.

Then you can start working with the if/else things you were talking about. In this situation, it would be better to do a switch, research that as well.

What you are dealing with is something that could help you learn a lot about Flash, but you will need to be prepared to do some research and reading to get this stuff. Basically you are trying to something more advanced, and outside of learning how to use flash better I wouldn't try it at this point. There are plenty of weather widgets out there already, but if you want to try to learn, then I'm all for that.

I would say start with a tutorial on xml in flash, and as you come across problems we are here to help.

Are you sure you can legally use weather.com? Last time I checked, you could not.

If someone provides a feed freely on their website, why can't you? You can't resell it for sure, but especially if you note the source I believe you can. If someone believes otherwise, there are other free options out there for weather feeds.

I just remember having to use nist.gov sometime ago b/c I couldn't legally use MSNweather. But this was literally years ago (2003 or so) when RSS feeds weren't as big as they are now.