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Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

brolly.sh

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Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#81
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terrific project, thank you! Use-cases will vary widely. For example if I used Brolly for sailing, I'd want wind speed in kts and wind direction as well as dew point, and I'd want a recent timeseries of air pressure to give an idea of the synoptic-scale situation. Of course these may be far outside your original use-cases. I think when people get a hold of Brolly, they're going to love it immediately, and t…

Thanks! I’ve also got a long list of additional data I’d like to see, such as sunrise / sunset times and astrological activity like upcoming meteor showers etc. I’m starting to think about dedicated sub pages that cover these use cases, with a single section on the main page that links into it. A sailing based page could definitely work here!

> A sailing based page could definitely work here!

Even within a niche category like sailing there's a wide range of user needs, for example reporting temperatures in C vs F, or pressure in hPa vs inHg.

Coming from another angle, would it be possible to URL-encode user preferences, so that everyone gets their own bespoke Brolly forecast? There can still be prefab pages for common situations, so that informal and power users are all delighted.

(edit: format)

Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#83
post #12
post #11

Looks great. One thing that initially tripped me up, I searched "Raleigh, NC" and got no place found. "Raleigh" worked.

That’s frustrating, thank you for the feedback. I’ll take a look at improving the search and potentially switching out the API provider. I currently use open-meteo as I was already using it for the weather forecast (it has a great weather API), and it made sense at the time to keep with a single provider.

I opened https://github.com/open-meteo/geocoding-api/issues/33 to keep track of that and will look into it in the next days (supporting it shouldn't be too hard)!

Re: Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

#86
Seeing a text-based weather report takes me back about 34 years! In 1992, I was finishing my Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. During breaks from dissertation writing, I spent a fair amount of time on the lab computer. One project that I undertook for fun was writing a Bourne shell script to access data from Weather Underground. While this project never led to 15 minutes (or even nanoseconds) of fame, the shell script did get used by a number of other sites.

It's great to see that there's still a use for plain-text weather!

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