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Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info

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Re: Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info

#31

Post by andresmh »

JeremyChase wrote: post #30
eoyola wrote: post #28

how do you get my ip? gets my lan ip 192.168.99.4 instead of the internet address.

Does your LAN use a proxy? I am doing this: @remote_ip = request.env["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"] I'm guessing that your 192.168.99.4 is being sent. The reason I grab this is because lighttpd is acting as a load balancer and I need the IP to find your location. Bummer about that.

This is a problem I've encountered while building my own web app. There most be a way from PHP (or whatever else you're using) to know the real external IP of a user that comes to a site, isn't there? If anyone knows how to do this please let me know.

Re: Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info

#34

Post by JeremyChase »

andresmh wrote: post #33

what service are you using for IP geolocation?

http://www.maxmind.com/app/support

I am doing the IP lookup locally using the Ruby and C plugin.

To do the Geolocation I am using the rails Geokit plugin and google's geolocation service.

Currently using Google's Weather API, but weatherfinder is written so that I can switch to wunderground with 1 line of code changed.

Re: Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info

#35

Post by anigbrowl »

It's good as a demonstration of your skills, but perhaps it should be a sub-page on your own site rather than having its own domain, since the functionality is kind of redundant. Add Celsius temperatures please. Farenheit is sooo 19th century :)

[SanFranciscoFilter] I don't know how much of an issue this is in other places, but Mrs Browl and I were discussing yesterday how useful it would be to have a San Francisco weather map that shows you weather in different parts of the city - it's not unusual for me to look out the window and find chilly fog (in the Sunset) then go to Potrero Hill and find it's a scorcher. Or the other way around.

If you could find multiple SF weather stations and make it into a widget or iPhone app or whatever, there would be a local but decent audience for it, because a single forecast for SF is basically meaningless.

Re: Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info

#36

Post by amkimian »

anigbrowl wrote: post #35

It's good as a demonstration of your skills, but perhaps it should be a sub-page on your own site rather than having its own domain, since the functionality is kind of redundant. Add Celsius temperatures please. Farenheit is sooo 19th century :) [SanFranciscoFilter] I don't know how much of an issue this is in other places, but Mrs Browl and I were discussing yesterday how useful it would be to have a San Francisco w…

[For SF] The Wundermap feature of weather underground does pretty much what you say here - http://tinyurl.com/6rxuxo (Zoom in a bit to get more stations/specific weather)

Re: Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info

#37

Post by frossie »

JeremyChase wrote: post #8
teej wrote: post #5

I actually like it a lot. Here's what I really like about it: Auto IP lookup. It pulls up exactly the city I would get using weather.com. Clean & Simple. You give me the information I want and get out of my way. Design. It's very well designed for what it is. ----- Here's what I don't like about it: The comments. They aren't really useful or relevant. I suppose if you ever gain "critical mass" this might start to be…

I don't expect to ever see critical mass on this so this is a problem. I think the comments are far more relevant if they are within a smaller range, maybe 10 miles would make them more useful. Regarding the forecast: for a weather site this site doesn't really show it very well; feedback well taken :)

I actually think the comments could be useful for certain larger areas (so 50 miles instead of 10). Not only I live in an area with a lot of microweather (it can be pouring at my house and sunny at work, but both work and home are covered by the same weather station and are 15 miles apart); but also we have vog emissions (think like smog, but with natural causes) whose concentrations are highly variable. So I think there would be some interest in having people being able to report local conditions; for example on voggy days I try to find a playground in a clearer area of the county. Mind you, that's not a problem many people have :-)

Re: Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info

#38

Post by JeremyChase »

anigbrowl wrote: post #35

It's good as a demonstration of your skills, but perhaps it should be a sub-page on your own site rather than having its own domain, since the functionality is kind of redundant. Add Celsius temperatures please. Farenheit is sooo 19th century :) [SanFranciscoFilter] I don't know how much of an issue this is in other places, but Mrs Browl and I were discussing yesterday how useful it would be to have a San Francisco w…

anigbrowl: It was a sub page to my personal blog domain for some time, but a .info domain is only $0.99 so I figured I'd get one. Also, it does have Celsius as an option; the link is above the forecasts.

Re: Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info

#39

Post by JeremyChase »

andresmh wrote: post #31
JeremyChase wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your LAN use a proxy? I am doing this: @remote_ip = request.env["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"] I'm guessing that your 192.168.99.4 is being sent. The reason I grab this is because lighttpd is acting as a load balancer and I need the IP to find your location. Bummer about that.

This is a problem I've encountered while building my own web app. There most be a way from PHP (or whatever else you're using) to know the real external IP of a user that comes to a site, isn't there? If anyone knows how to do this please let me know.

Apparently X-Forwarded-For is an array that has all the proxies in it. Check out this page and we should be able to fix the problem. Thanks molo for the tip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For

Re: Ask HN: Please give feedback on simple weather site: weatherfinder.info

#40

Post by dce »

JeremyChase wrote: post #11
thorax wrote: post #7

I was skeptical when I clicked the link. Neat, though. I like it well enough. Comments: * It incorrectly thought I was 1200 miles away from where I am. Probably due to another ISP recently acquiring my local ISP and GeoIP databases getting confused now. It doesn't seem like anything I do can trump the GeoIP when I visit the site-- it always sends me back to the wrong state. * I like the look and the local comments, I…

I'm using the free maxmind database that is updated monthly, so it isn't a huge surprise that it got out of date. You are right; you should be able to set your location. The 'updated 1 minute ago' thing is also a problem because you can't do any caching of data that renders a date like that. I have thought about changing this for that reason, but yours is a good point.

You could try something like this: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1557-javascript-makes-rel...
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