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

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Summary

Brolly is a plain-text weather forecast site that displays current conditions and a weekly forecast for a given location, as demonstrated for York, England.

The UK MET office recently redesigned their site, adding a lot of additional whitespace, scrolling, and animations. This significantly reduced its usability for me, and left me wanting an ‘at a glance’ weather site.<p>I made <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brolly.sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brolly.sh</a>, a minimalist, plain text weather forecasting site. You can use it to view weather from around the world, with: 7 day forecast; Previous day log (so you can confirm it definitely was cooler &#x2F; hotter &#x2F; wetter &#x2F; drier yesterday!); Hourly rain, wind, temperature, conditions; Hourly UV, air quality and pollen, including pollen type specific forecasts within the EU &#x2F; UK; Location search and last 5 locations; Location specific units.<p>I mostly made the site for myself, if anyone else also benefits from it that’s an added advantage.<p>You can check out the weather in York, UK at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brolly.sh&#x2F;forecast&#x2F;RWFP2qW8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brolly.sh&#x2F;forecast&#x2F;RWFP2qW8</a>, or search for a location at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brolly.sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brolly.sh</a><p>The site is deliberately styled as a single long scrollable column, to work on mobile phones. You can view it on desktop too, there&#x27;s just a lot of horizontal padding. I naturally took a lot of inspiration from plaintextsports.com. Despite not being a sports fan, I love its aesthetic. But, you&#x27;ll hopefully see that this site isn&#x27;t a rip off, and has its own deliberate look and feel.<p>Visualisations are really important to showing information at a glance. I spent a lot of time designing the different visualisations and making them work with only characters. My favourite is the hourly heat map used for pollen count.<p>It&#x27;s also frustrating to have an interactive site, where you can&#x27;t share a page with a friend and have them see what you&#x27;re seeing. To solve this, all page state (i.e. location, selected day, expanded &#x2F; collapsed sections), is stored in the URL. You can share or bookmark the specific view, and know that you&#x27;ll always be able to come back to it.<p>The site uses PocketBase. It’s written in Go and plain HTML&#x2F;JavaScript&#x2F;CSS. All pages are backend rendered, with light JavaScript to handle re-loading content without page jumps when using interactive features like next &#x2F; previous day navigation. Weather forecasts are fetched from open-meteo.com, which has a very generous free tier. However, I also built a custom LRU cache on top of PocketBase’s SQLite DB to cache forecasts for 5 minutes, and avoid putting unnecessary pressure on the open-meteo API.
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# Plain-text weather forecast for York, York, England, United Kingdom - brolly.sh Source: [https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8) [brolly\.sh](https://brolly.sh/) plain text weather forecast ☂ [change location](https://brolly.sh/) ============================================= Now light drizzle temperature 17\.7C \(feels 17\.3C\) wind 9 \(18\) mph / uv 0\.0 / aqi 19 Today overcast temperature 15C \- 22C wind avg 11 mph \(gusts 22 mph\) precipitation 0\.2mm ============================================= This Week ``` Day Conditions Temp Wind Precip Yesterday overcast 13-23 9/19 0 *Today overcast 15-22 11/22 0.2 Sun 26/07 overcast 16-20 12/24 0.2 Mon 27/07 overcast 14-21 9/19 0 Tue 28/07 overcast 18-25 9/17 0 Wed 29/07 overcast 17-29 6/11 0 Thu 30/07 p.cloudy 16-26 7/12 0 Fri 31/07 p.cloudy 14-23 9/17 0 ``` <[Yesterday](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=-1)Today[Sun 26/07](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=1)\> \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- Conditions ``` Time Conditions Temp Wind MPH » show earlier hours (00:00-20:00) 21:00 light drizzle 18(17) 9/18 <- now 22:00 light drizzle 18(17) 9/17 23:00 overcast 17(17) 9/17 ``` <[Yesterday](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=-1)Today[Sun 26/07](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=1)\> \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- Precipitation ``` » show earlier hours (00:00-20:00) 21:00 #################### 0.2mm 2% <- now 22:00 #################### 0.2mm 4% 23:00 0mm 2% +----+----+----+----+ 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0 ``` now 0\.2mm \(2%\) peak 0\.2mm \(2%\) @ 21:00\-22:00 <[Yesterday](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=-1)Today[Sun 26/07](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=1)\> \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- UV ``` 4| # 3| ### 2| ####### 1| ########### 0+------------------------ 0 6 12 18 ^ now ``` now 0 \(low\) peak 3\.55 \(moderate\) @ 11:00 ``` key 0-2 low 3-5 moderate 6-8 high 9-10 very high ``` <[Yesterday](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=-1)Today[Sun 26/07](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=1)\> \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- Air Quality ``` 40| 30| # 20|######################## 10|######################## 0+------------------------ 0 6 12 18 ^ now ``` now 19 \(good\) peak 25 \(fair\) @ 11:00 <[Yesterday](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=-1)Today[Sun 26/07](https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8?day=1)\> \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- Pollen ``` Grass -------*---------------- Mugwort .......*................ 0 6 12 18 ^ now . low - medium = high # v.high * peak ``` now grass 11\.1 \(medium\) now mugwort 3\.5 \(low\) peak grass 18\.1 @ 07:00 peak mugwort 7\.4 @ 07:00 ============================================= weather data last fetched at: 21:10

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