

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

http://weatherfinder.info/<p>This is a simple weather site with the ability to see regional comments. I'm posting it to HN for the heck of it as ya'll might appreciate it.<p>Backstory: I had the idea last fall after seeing umbrellatoday.com and thinking it needed IP lookup. I had a crude prototype up when the post about goingtorain.com was posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378987  After that, I put it the idea the shelf because the idea "had been done", but I always wanted to finish it.<p>I implemented some features people had asked for in that thread and put this site together. It uses Rails, caches queries to the weather service, saves cookies with your preferences, and uses the Tango icon set.<p>Jeremy
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thorax
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 suppose. Those might be more interesting to those people in big cities.

* I don't like the "updated 1 minute ago" in this case. I plan to leave the window up for a few days on one of my other machines and that won't tell me jack when I want to refresh it unless it's counting down or if it has the actual date.

* Would be nice if it auto-refreshed every 10-15 minutes or something.

Looks nice enough.

~~~
JeremyChase
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huge surprise that it got out of date.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.

~~~
dce
You could try something like this:
[http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1557-javascript-makes-
rel...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1557-javascript-makes-relative-
times-compatible-with-caching)

~~~
JeremyChase
That is great, thanks!

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teej
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 useful, but I have my doubts.
There's no guidance as to what I should be saying and why.

4 day Forecast. I think this deserves a little more priority on the page. I
also feel like a horizontal format is more appropriate, but go with your gut.
What you've done now looks pretty damn good for a small project.

Indentation. The text could use a little more structure than just indenting
everywhere. This could just be nitpicky.

URL. .info's make me cry. just find a small, 3-5 letter work that's easy to
remember, tack it on to weather, and get the .com. I prefer to
<http://bustaname.com> because my super-smart friend made it.

~~~
JeremyChase
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 :)

~~~
frossie
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 :-)

------
mtinkerhess
Nice page. A couple of comments:

I would prefer not to have #000 on #fff.

Where does your data come from? That's not immediately clear or easy to find.
Maybe this could go in a FAQ.

What does the "use Manhattan" part mean in "Leave Comment use Manhattan" (for
example)? Why do some comments say "said this about New York"? Are those
related? Looks like yes, but now the site thinks I'm from Villers-le-bouillet
when I comment. Go figure.

Comments are easy to use. Nice.

I'm not sure I'm going to remember the url. The .info especially throws me
off. Maybe if you dropped some vowels or something...

~~~
JeremyChase
Sorry about black on white.. I'm not much of a designer, so this is what I
came up with.

The 'use Manhattan' link will set your location. So if you click 'use
Manhattan', when you comment, it will give that as your location in the
comment attribution.

The data is currently coming from the google weather API. I wrote a parser for
the wunderground API as well, but the latency is so high that I went back to
google. I may swith to NOAA for US IP's.

Agreed, a FAQ is sorely missing from this little site.

------
JeremyChase
A real link for your convenience: <http://weatherfinder.info/>

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asimjalis
Why doesn't HN enable links in stories?

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JeremyChase
from the HN FAQ:

How do I make a link in a question?

You can't. (This is to prevent people from using this method as a way of
submitting a link, but with their comments in a privileged position at the top
of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then
add a regular comment.)

~~~
sachinag
FFS people, submit your Please Review as a link, then immediately copy/paste
your description as a comment.

~~~
m_eiman
I find it convenient to have the description always on top like this. If it's
a comment it'll probably end up some way down the comment list and it might
not be obvious what it is.

~~~
ivankirigin
That biases the question. Impressions without a description are more valuable.
If you need a description, put it on your site.

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sfphotoarts
I love it!! Its got a great sense of style and does one thing really well. I
wouldn't have bothered with comments personally because I live in SF where we
have no weather to speak of. Sometimes it's chilly, sometimes its a little
warm, but that's about the only extremes we have and I see no reason to UGC
it. The location detection was spot on for my desktop (much better than
Wolfram Alpha that thinks I am in San Jose - as if!!!)

It didn't work on the blackberry, the ip address could not be resolved to a
place (for very good reasons outside of your control)

If I were the designer (you!) I'd loose the comments and make the actual
weather info more prominent and maybe more data if you have it. For me, its
about weather not what people say about the weather.

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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.

~~~
amkimian
[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)

~~~
anigbrowl
Woah! Day.YouMadeIt = True

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duarte
I love it!

There were actually 3 comments for london, and I like that feature. Maybe it
could be improved by asking something more specific ("is it really not raining
right now? wow!").

I needs something really good to beat the simplicity of just checking that
beautiful dashboard widget..

I also think the layout needs work: why is london the biggest thing? the
"wind/humidity" is actually quite small compared to the rest of the interface
(smaller than the blue "use fahrenheit" link!), some icons would definitely
help, etc..

Still I like the comments idea best out of those things. And the geolocation
is also a clear winner!

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aroon
Have you considered using Facebook connect to make the page more relevant?
Local comments can be fun to read once in a while but if a friend has left a
comment I definitely want to see it. Just make people log into facebook to
leave a comment. You can also tell me what other friends have "been interested
in" the weather at the location I'm looking at.

It also gives you a clear method of expansion (ie. into facebook through mini-
feed stories and stuff).

I like the page. It's very simple and to the point.

Love the page. It's very simple and nice.

~~~
there
so do you like it or love it?

------
there
_disclaimer: i made goingtorain.com_

i would make the current day's forecast bigger, since that's probably what
most people want to see. the current conditions are not as important since you
can easily see whether it's currently raining or whatever without going to the
site.

also, what kind of comments are you expecting for visitors to leave? i would
think that spammers would quickly fill them up with junk and drown out any
useful ones, but i can't really think of what useful comments others would
want to read on a weather site.

~~~
JeremyChase
Hardly anyone leaves comments. The idea to put comments in came from me
sitting at the computer wondering if it was actually raining. I thought it
would be nice if I could see if someone locally had said if it was or not(or
if it had). Since no-one leaves comments it seems like a pointless feature.
Not sure what to do with it now, maybe go look out the window.

Regarding the forecasts.. Yeah, it is pretty weak. I had planned on using
Wunderground's API which gives you a lot more data (as I'm sure you know), but
the latency is was so long that I just stuck with google. I may switch to NOAA
to get more data for the current day's forecast, and current conditions. But I
had spent enough time on the site and, was tired of delaying. It is just for
fun, afterall.

Thanks for your feedback. Jer

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garcara
I would suggest the icons on the left side of the weather (I didn't even see
them the first 2 times I looked and I felt they were missing). I don't mind
the vertical presentation but I would suggest you do something to distinguish
the days such as different background colors. Right now they kinda blend into
each other in my opinion. A simple fix to put the weather as the highlight of
the page would be to put it where the comments are. Most people read left to
right.

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joecode
Where are you getting your weather data? I developed a (non-competing) iPhone
weather app, and discovered that the data can be a very tricky matter.

Anyway, looks pretty good. Simple is good. I've also noticed that
forecast.weather.gov is a lot nicer than, say, weather.com (no ads and all
that clutter).

------
soundsop
Bookmarked!

You may want to add a small "change city" link at the bottom of the city name
that's in a huge font. That's the first place that I looked.

Also, I like the font sizing, but I think the emphasis is backwards. The
weather should be in the bigger font and the city in the smaller font.

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thingie
I like it.

I would only appreciate to be able to choose another city based on its
geographic distance (something like "show a small list of five other cities
nearest to the current one"). They might be more relevant for me at the
moment.

~~~
thingie
And I would like to see wind speed in kilometers per hour, not mph.

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csomar
ok i'm in sfax and it showed up Tunis weather.

any way, it's simple and good, but i don't think i'll use a site to get the
weather, i have it in my windows side bar, so why trouble with the website; I
don't find comments really important.

What i want to tell you, you have thought about the need and that's good, but
how to provide the solution for the need and the way to provide it, is the
most important

~~~
JeremyChase
I find that I prefer to look at the weather using my dock widget, and I wrote
this site. So I hear you. :)

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jnorthrop
I like it! Add a link to the radar and I'll use it. -- I like to see the radar
in motion so I can see the rain coming...

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altxwally
It doesn't support japanese. 日本語. But still very good! It does support spanish
though

~~~
JeremyChase
The site has problems with character encoding.. It is a super annoying bug
that I haven't yet found the right answer to. I don't expect it'll ever fully
support Japanese, but it should fail more gracefully than it does.

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

~~~
JeremyChase
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.

~~~
andresmh
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.

~~~
JeremyChase
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>

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andresmh
what service are you using for IP geolocation?

~~~
JeremyChase
<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.

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Zarathu
You know what I do? F12.

