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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

#41

Post by hogwasher »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #38

Congrats! Very small suggestion: it’d be cool if you used a service to geoip the incoming ip address - there’s also https://developers.cloudflare.com/network/ip-geolocation/ that will inject the lat lng directly into the request header to your server It’d just help set a good enough starting location. Cheers!

I actually love that it doesn't do this, because the sites that do are a headache (and sometimes entirely unusable) if using a VPN.

And since you can bookmark it with your location setting, automatic IP location could only make the first visit marginally faster for non-VPN users, anyway

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

#42

Post by smnscu »

I was thoroughly confused at why the website was showing the weather for York. Since I studied there (and it's straight up a lovely place), I visit quite often and subsequently check the weather. I thought I had set it but couldn't remember doing so. As someone else said, this being text-based makes it particularly digestible to LLMs. Out of curiosity, I looked up weather MCPs and stumbled upon this: https://github.com/weather-mcp/weather-mcp

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

#46

Post by wyclif »

jsax wrote: post #10
speerer wrote: post #8

Love it. This reminds me of wttr.in, but with the benefit of interactivity and that it works much better on mobile. I also happen to often use terminals in a narrower aspect, so wttr.in doesn't work perfectly for me. It'd be very cool if a curl call to your site rendered a terminal text view!

Great suggestion, thank you. I’ll definitely keep that in mind as an improvement. There’s been some other feedback that it’d be good if there was a ‘true’ plain text only mode, and this ties in well.

Heads up, in a lot of locations the city is doubled up (displayed twice). Otherwise, I like it a lot and I have it saved to my weather bookmarks.

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

#47

Post by jen20 »

jsax wrote: post #12
8ig8 wrote: 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 tried searching for "Austin, Texas, United States", "Austin, Texas" and just "Texas" and didn't find very much - not sure if I'm missing how they're indexed, but I'd expect at least one of those to find it!

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

#48

Post by efilife »

winterscott wrote: post #43

This is actually a great format for LLM consumption too. Structured, concise weather information without unnecessary UI noise is much easier for agents to parse and summarize. A JSON endpoint or an MCP server on top of this would be an interesting extension.

but why? We have apis for this, why parse a site and feed it to a llm?

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

#50

Post by jsax »

weatherphan wrote: post #36
jsax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll definitely look at adding this in, along with potential the wet bulb temperature. Thanks for the feedback!

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!

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