Topic: Stock Quote widget fubar?

Is there a pervasive problem with the Stock Quotes widget, lately?  Mine seems to have degenerated to just showing N/A for the ticker and NaN in all numeric fields.  (Even after rebooting the Chumby One, yes.)   The config for the widget at chumby.com seems to be ok.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

Yes, it appears so, the free third-party service ( http://www.webservicex.net/New/Home/ServiceDetail/9 ) that that widget uses for quotes has a history of going offline for a few days at a time a couple of times a year, but it appears to be down for good.  It turns out that a lot of software also used their currency conversion services, and that's down too, which caused a lot of havoc with various e-commerce sites (it basically reports 1-1 conversion for every currency).

I'm looking into replacing with a commercial stock quote service, if I can find one that makes economic sense.  Chumby used a commercial service but it's prohibitively expensive under the current circumstances.

I have put out request for pricing to a few services, we'll see what they come up with.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

ok, will stay tuned.  Right this second it's probably better if I don't look at my stock quotes, anyway tongue

I wonder if there's some way to leverage an individual-account service per user so that each Chumby user has his/her own account rather than BlueOcty having to have a commercial multi-user access.  No ideas on that, though.  The Yahoo Finance terms seem to prohibit even that kind of redistribution sad

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

Well, here's basically the deal.

To get a license to redistribute delayed quotes just from NASDAQ, I'm looking at $3K/year.  Most of the feed services I'm getting quotes from are giving me pricing of around $10K-30K/year on top of the per market fees.

My guess is that if I look at the number of subscribers that are actively using the stock widget, I'd probably be underwater.

I don't know if there's any service that supports an individual to sign up for an account and link a feed to the widget.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

I found one service that would allow users to independently subscribe to end-of-day quote feeds for the widget, but it would be around $5/month, independent of the Chumby subscription feeds.  You would sign up and enter a token into the widget's customization.

Not sure that's good enough.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

It is funny

Their api seems up, web page too, just doesn't return anything.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

Yeah, the service is still there, just returns an exception.

I tried contacting webservicex, but their support email bounces and I got no response from the other email address I could find.

Some of the other services still work.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

I bet webservicex has been 'unmanned' for quite a while and this just happened to break at this moment.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

philhu wrote:

I bet webservicex has been 'unmanned' for quite a while and this just happened to break at this moment.

Possibly.  It has had similar issues in the past, usually due to a "disk full" (probably log files) or other administrative type issue.

The copyright on the site has been updated to 2016, but that could be dynamic.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

Well, stocks are working today, or were this morning.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

philhu wrote:

Well, stocks are working today, or were this morning.

Hmm, well, if they were, it seems like they're down again, at least for me.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

same here, down again

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

I don't have the widget, but the "example query" feature on their site seems to give valid data.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

yes, it seems to hit or miss from good data to 'exception'

i bet their server needs a reboot

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

this seems down for good now...sigh

16 (edited by mayzilla 2016-05-12 14:11:33)

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

Have a potential solution to this long standing issue...why not use RSS? NASDAQ offers free RSS quotes (go to /services/rss.aspx on their web site).

I tried this with the "stock" RSS widget but it only displays the headline. I verified that all of the info is there using a desktop RSS reader. Seems like it would be fairly easy to alter the existing widget or create a new one with this type of RSS in mind. Thoughts?

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

Hmmm, I used curl with the Stock Quote RSS feed with symbol AAPL, and all I get is an "Access Denied" response.

$ curl "http://www.nasdaq.com/aspxcontent/NasdaqRSS.aspx?data=quotes&symbol=AAPL"
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>Access Denied</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Access Denied</H1>
 
You don't have permission to access "http&#58;&#47;&#47;www&#46;nasdaq&#46;com&#47;aspxcontent&#47;NasdaqRSS&#46;aspx&#63;" on this server.<P>
Reference&#32;&#35;18&#46;677cd17&#46;1463092829&#46;53f89bc
</BODY>
</HTML>

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

The guy who runs the site's email is vijaywalter at yahoo dot com if you want to contact him.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

here's the link that the Nasdaq site generated for an AAPL quote:
http://nasdaq.com/aspxcontent/NasdaqRSS … ymbol=AAPL

the result in my RSS reader (Postbox) looks like this (which would be perfect on the Chum):
http://dropbox.com/s/xfrctum7zlwkyf8/Sc … 7.png?dl=0

edit: fixed links -- diamaunt.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

mayzilla wrote:

here's the link that the Nasdaq site generated for an AAPL quote:
nasdaq DOT com SLASH aspxcontent SLASH NasdaqRSS DOT aspx?data=quotes&symbol=AAPL

the result in my RSS reader (Postbox) looks like this (which would be perfect on the Chum):
dropbox DOT com SLASH s SLASH xfrctum7zlwkyf8 SLASH Screenshot%202016-06-06%2010.45.27.png?dl=0

This forum doesn't ban links in posts, you know.

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

The system would not let me post until I took the links out. The error message specifically said this. Maybe a security setting has changed?

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

I think users below a certain post count cannot post links.

23

Re: Stock Quote widget fubar?

I wonder how practical it might be to adapt the old/dead Stock Quote widget to use the ETrade API to harvest market data.  That API also handles a lot of other stuff related to specific ETrade accounts and trading, but that wouldn't be necessary here: just the market data by ticker symbol.

The ETrade API uses OAUTH to validate access to a specific ETrade account, but I think it is possible to set up an ETrade account without actually funding it for trade (or paying any fees), so that might not necessarily be a huge hurdle, at least for USA users. I suppose the same kind of gymnastics now used for the Google Calender widgets could be employed for login/authorization.

Info here: https://us.etrade.com/active-trading/api
and the API document here: https://content.etrade.com/etrade/estat … tation.pdf

A couple of things jumped out at me.  One is the limited lifespan of the authorization token, but that can be renewed so long as the widget keeps track of doing so when needed.   The other is request throttling, but the rates don't appear to be terribly low given that a  multiple ticker symbols' market data can be acquired with a single request (which is counted as one request: they give this example specifically).

Oh, also: "The platform is free for developers to use."  See https://developer.etrade.com/ctnt/dev-p … pport-FAQs   However, I wonder how enthusiastic they will be about an application that does not enable trading, just market monitoring.

Anyway: there's a thought.