hey, that's my site. it's been up for a while but it got posted to stumbleupon the other day and has been seeing a ton of traffic. glad it's of use to anyone other than myself.
i made it one day after being annoyed with all the junk on weather.com. i just wanted a simple answer whether it was going to rain so i knew which car i could drive that day.
I really dig the simplicity - in the app and in use. We have a dynamic IP that's not even remotely tied to our location (Hughes Net Satellite) and so it seems to get reset every time we get a new IP. Any way to implement some cookie to save the zip code?
The 'helvetica' included with nearly all X servers is a terrible bitmap that maxes out at 16pt. Some windows installations also have a similar crapfest.
I recommend using font-family:"helvetica neue", arial, sans-serif;
i'm not sure how it would really be an app; the page renders fine on mobile safari so couldn't you just add the bookmark to the home screen? i could probably add a apple-touch-icon.png file so it has an icon instead of a crop of the webpage.
It picked my location perfectly, but then gave me a temperature in Fahrenheit. All you need now is to match locations to measurement standards (ie. US, UK and that one other country imperial, all others metric).
Just goes to show that it's not easy to match location to measurement standard: you would be wrong if you picked Imperial measurements for the UK, unless the person viewing the page is of a certain mindset and born before about 1975.
I was raised in the UK, and used celsius. Now I live in the US and have learned to use Fahrenheit.
On a related note, I was very annoyed that Yahoo Weather will allow you to either choose centigrade and kilometers per hour, or Fahrenheit and MPH, but not to mix and match. Insane.
IMHO The UK is slightly more complex than that. When it's hot, we use Fahrenheit - "It's almost 100℉ out there!.
When it's cold we use Celsius - "Brrr! -7℃"
More importantly, the UK is far simpler than all the others.
The answer to "is it going to rain?" here is always "Who knows? Probably... can't really say. It looks sunny outside, but it was raining this morning so it might rain again later today."
i changed it to default (on your first visit, before you have a cookie) to celsius for anything outside of the us. when you click on the answer you can toggle between celsius and fahrenheit and override whatever it picked.
Question: I've always wanted to see today's temperature in terms of yesterday's, so like, "it's going to be 5 degrees warmer." Anyone know if this service is already offered somewhere?
But that site has the "enter your zip code" wall, a wholly unfriendly stumbling block for a non-US user to be faced with on any site. (You'd be surprised how many people, erm, "live" in 90210 on signup forms!) goingtorain.com somehow detected my precise town and told me straight.
I hear ya. My name is Bill Gates and I sign up to an unheard of amount of services from my apt in the 90210 area. Thank god for the great spam filter I have on my personal email: support@microsoft.com, I get alot of spam there for some reason
yeah goingtorain.com wins. It has location detection and you can use it outside the USA, which is handy for me since I've only spent 0.04% of my life there.
I am a lover of putting 90210 as my zip code though, I did it by reflex to try out umbrellatoday.com haha
I agree that there's a logrithmic scale between usage-required and annoyance perceived. ie, that one click is a huge difference compared to literally doing nothing (but hitting a bookmark, or maybe it's your home page).
However, umbrellatoday has txting ability; which is not on goingtorain.com.
I love the simplicity of goingtorain. But, umbrellatoday wins out for me because it rarely rains here in LA. It isn't worth me checking each day, so umbrellatoday's text message options seems great -- now let's see if it works.
I like how simple it is, but it definitely needs an RSS feed. Seeing as they're using some sort of IP geolocation, it would be cool if the forecast 'followed' me in the feed when I switched locations.
I think "pointless" is going a bit overboard, it's up to the client to decide how long to cache a feed, and the cache policy for the feed should use normal HTTP conventions - the Last-modified, If-modified-since and Expires headers.
If the feed expired in 60 minutes that would be enough to update for changing locations.
I love this site. Last year I posted an idea on my blog that was a collection of extremely simple sites where you get instant answers to questions like this. Is it raining, did the Cubs win today, is the stock market up or down, etc... Cool to see this one in action.
I only wish http://www.doineedajacket.com/ would look as clean and lose the clutter (ads, discussions, blah, blah, blah). However, I still prefer it because it gives a reason for needing a jacket (it's chilly, rain etc) and works across the world.
In the Netherlands we've got http://www.buienradar.nl, pretty cluttered with ads but it's more accurate than a 'maybe' :)
You can see when rain clouds are approaching your area; almost 'real time' ;)
Nicely done - except it says it won't rain, so I looked outside - no wait it is raining. From other comments looks like Google's fault though - but still: putting that my emphasis on one aspect of the forecast and then getting it wrong ...
In summary: A reverse-DNS search through the DNS system combined with more information from geolocation DBs can usually pinpoint location to within a few miles unless the user goes to some lengths to hide it (ie. use VPNs, tor, ip spoofing, etc...). Several free databases available if you want to do this yourself.
Actually, unless you're on AOL or a handful of other IPs, you can geolocate too >99% accuracy to a country level for free. See this: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity .
I'll join the crowd. Worked for me: Manila, Philippines. No data available about the weather though: "i'm not sure what the weather is like in Makati,PH"
Nice and fine, but here in Europe, in times of satellites, you might sit in another country as your ISP, so the actual location might differ quite a bit.
No indeed it isn't, nor is pointless commenting on news stories. This post was of another minimalist .com that serves a single purpose without the extra noise or cruft other sites that provide that information carry.
i made it one day after being annoyed with all the junk on weather.com. i just wanted a simple answer whether it was going to rain so i knew which car i could drive that day.