[HN Gopher] Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature "...
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Show HN: A world map of 24x365 average temperature "fingerprints"
Author : jacobn
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-10-12 21:07 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (weatherspark.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (weatherspark.com)
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Nitpick: Changing the temperature unit does not automatically
| update the help modal (elsewhere is fine); it seems that a
| particular language is always associated with a particular unit.
| jacobn wrote:
| Ah, fixed, thanks!
| crancher wrote:
| The density and type of ads masks well presented information. I
| don't see the ads but am left unwilling to share links to the
| site where I sure would otherwise.
| jacobn wrote:
| Yeah, the ads are a double-edged sword. We've been running this
| site for... ten years? And for the longest time it languished
| with some Google Adsense ads on there, making enough to keep
| the servers running, but not enough to invest more effort in
| it.
|
| Then we recently switched ad provider, and the site grew a bit
| as covid started easing up, revenue doubled with the potential
| for more, and boom it's worth it to invest in it again.
|
| I don't like the ads. I'd rather offer the site without them.
| But without them the site wouldn't be up - I'd have to turn off
| the servers, and there wouldn't be a map of temperature
| fingerprints at all.
|
| I really wish there were a better solution. But so far there
| just isn't.
|
| At least we don't do anti-ad-block ;)
|
| (I'm one of the site creators)
| pininja wrote:
| I agree, without reading your comment I thought the map
| fingerprints were linking to a tabloid weather report. I went
| back and realized the pages have very well developed
| interactive data visualizations.
| mutagen wrote:
| I miss the old WeatherSpark visualization of past conditions and
| the future forecast.
|
| They had a wonderful graph of various weather parameters in a
| nice slippy zoom interface that made it easy to visualize the
| forecast. It was built in Flash and they decided that a HTML
| version wasn't viable due to declining ad revenue.
|
| Some appreciation and screenshots of the old version:
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sad-day-weatherspark-dashboar...
|
| https://flowingdata.com/2011/03/14/weatherspark-for-more-gra...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/4hkbq4/rest_in_pea...
|
| https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pubs/fulltext/2016/20160004.pdf - The
| interface was even noted in a NOAA paper.
| jacobn wrote:
| Yeah, those were good times indeed. I try not to think too much
| about just how many hours/days/weeks/months I spent writing
| creatively cached Flash graph drawing to get the silky smooth
| pan & zoom behavior the dashboard offered.
|
| But while lord Google is amazing at indexing SEOd text content,
| they aren't (weren't?) very good at feeding traffic to a tool
| with effectively no text. How could they know it was a good way
| to view the forecast for San Francisco without having a
| dedicated weathespark.com/forecast/san_francisco page with a
| decent amount of text along the lines of "forecast", "ten day
| forecast", "temperature", "precipitation", "rain", etc?
|
| We did try to do something like that but Google never picked it
| up - while many people loved the dashboard, as a fraction of
| overall forecast consumers it was probably quite tiny, so I
| can't say I blame them ;)
| WmyEE0UsWAwC2i wrote:
| That dashboard was gold. RIP.
| floatrock wrote:
| Searching for any recipe shows the same paperclip-maximizing-
| gone-amok do-not-want SEO trap: I don't care about some made-
| up story about how this ratatouille makes you think of
| summers at grandma's garden. That's all empty word-calories
| best left for the writers at pixar. Something truly
| revolutionary would be if google ranked recipe sites by
| higher recipe-to-fluff ratios.
|
| Thanks for developing all the stuff at weatherspark. It's one
| of my favorite practical examples of compact visualization
| done right.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Congratulations on the new thing! I've loved Weatherspark ever
| since y'all were doing very innovative presentation back in 2013
| or so.
|
| One suggestion; have you tried re-centering Southern hemisphere
| calendars so summer is still in the middle? The "red dot in the
| middle" is such a clear pattern, no reason you couldn't have it
| in Australia too.
| jacobn wrote:
| We've talked about it, but so far no, it messes with the x-axis
| a little too much (averages, history, compare, everything needs
| to work & line up across both time & northern/southern
| hemisphere, and what graph has two x-axes anyway!? ;) and while
| neat it's a little marginal from a substantive utility
| perspective?
| gmurphy wrote:
| Double agree with this suggestion - as I've split my life
| between hemispheres, weatherspark has been enormously useful
| for explaining relative climates to new and old friends, but I
| always have to edit the comparison graphs myself to put summer
| in the middle before sharing so you can actually compare the
| differences.
| jacobn wrote:
| Hmm... maybe for just the compare pages then? I'll chat with
| James about it to see what we can do.
|
| (I'm one of the site creators)
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Wow! Such a great site and very good visualization of weather
| data in easy to read plots/graphs.
| dom96 wrote:
| This is really awesome visualisation. Really shows at a glance
| the climate of each location.
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(page generated 2021-10-12 23:00 UTC)