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

[JeremyChase]

http://weatherfinder.info/

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.

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.

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.

Jeremy

[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I'm using the free maxmind database that is updated monthly, so it isn't a huge surprise that it got out of date.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.

[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 :)

[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/

[asimjalis]

Why doesn't HN enable links in stories?

[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.

[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)

[JeremyChase]

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.

[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!

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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. :)

[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...

[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.

[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]

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.

[Zarathu]

You know what I do? F12.