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

(brolly.sh)

103 points | by jsax 6 hours ago

15 comments

  • speerer 3 hours ago
    Love it. This reminds me of wttr.in, but with the benefit of interactivity and that it works much better on mobile. I also happen to often use terminals in a narrower aspect, so wttr.in doesn't work perfectly for me. It'd be very cool if a curl call to your site rendered a terminal text view!
    • jsax 3 hours ago
      Great suggestion, thank you. I’ll definitely keep that in mind as an improvement. There’s been some other feedback that it’d be good if there was a ‘true’ plain text only mode, and this ties in well.
      • trollbridge 1 hour ago
        It's sort of okay (but not amazing) with

          w3m -4 -dump https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8
        
        Ideally, you would let someone set an Accept: content type of text/plain, or else have an endpoint like brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8.txt
        • O1111OOO 32 minutes ago
          This is US only via the finger protocol (using netcat):

          printf 'weather:85334\r\n' | nc bbs.airandwave.net 79

          More info:

          printf 'weather\r\n' | nc bbs.airandwave.net 79

          • trollbridge 10 minutes ago
            Disappointed you didn’t just say

              finger weather:85534@bbs.airandwave.net
  • jonahx 2 hours ago
    I love plain text services. One of their benefits is near instant load time. A nitpick, but this takes a few seconds to load on a fast broadband connection for me. I get the delay even refreshing the same page, where I'd expect the cache to be hit.
    • jsax 2 hours ago
      Sorry about this, and thank you for the heads up. The site runs as a PocketBase instance on a small 512mb DigitalOcean droplet in their London DC, and is getting more load than usual at the moment.

      I’ll take a look though at whether there’s anything causing fundamental slowness in the cache read / page rendering pipeline.

      • jonahx 2 hours ago
        Looking at chrome dev tools, it looks like it might be the custom font causing the delay. I'm not sure exactly why though.
        • jsax 2 hours ago
          Interesting, I’d have naively assumed that’d be cached after first load by Chrome. Definitely one to investigate further.
          • hahahaa 2 hours ago
            Might as well drop custom fonts? This minimalist site would be fine with built in font families.

            I recommend run Google Lighthouse for a single visitor view of perf and then use a load testing tool (locust, jmeter etc. to check load handling)

            If you want to that is :)

    • bigmattystyles 2 hours ago
      Weird, on my iPhone it loaded instantly.
  • bluebarbet 1 hour ago
    Seems like a good use case for Unicode weather symbols.
  • firasd 3 hours ago
    Very interesting. The past few days' trend is so common in small talk and general weather discourse ("it was warmer last week") but underrated in weather apps. It's helpful that Open-Meteo provides that data

    This output is incidentally perfectly context engineered for LLMs too; I pasted the Delhi page contents into Arena .ai and asked "what's the gist" and qwen3.6-plus said (among other things) " A hot, humid day with a slight chance of afternoon showers." and gemini-3.1-pro-preview said "Mostly clear, but hot and very humid. While the actual high is 34°C, it will feel like 42°C in the afternoon."

    • andrepd 1 hour ago
      Yes, I'm very annoyed that I cannot look at historical data (even from the past couple of days) in weather websites!
  • goodmythical 2 hours ago
    Would be nice if desktop rendered in columns. Would be nice if it were curl-able (like not serving raw html to curl). Would be nice if URL pattern was like wttr.in (NYC for example is https://brolly.sh/forecast/YcUDdBLc <---which means nothing to me, vs wttr.in/nyc <---which is plainly obvious)
  • walthamstow 1 hour ago
    Oh god I'm glad I'm not the only one who hates the new Met Office website/app, but their forecasts and radar maps are the best. Where do you get the data from?
    • jsax 1 hour ago
      It uses open-meteo.com. Their forecast API returns data from around 30 different models depending on location, and typically uses Met Office data in the UK. I don’t force to only Met Office though, as they don’t give data for everything shown (such as the pollen count per species).

      Open-meteo has a very generous free tier, and reasonable pricing. It also lets you fetch weather from previous days, which I’ve included so you can see if it’s relatively hotter/colder etc. than yesterday.

  • kachnuv_ocasek 4 hours ago
    How do you turn on the text-only mode? I've tried Accept: text/plain but I always get HTML.
    • wormpilled 3 hours ago
    • raajg 3 hours ago
      Don't think it's 'true' plain text. HTML/CSS rendering 'like' plain text.

      Still beautiful though!

      • goodmythical 2 hours ago
        curling it (with the relevant link from browser because locations are encoded in the URL rather than plain like wettr.in) shows html
  • devindotcom 3 hours ago
    This is cool and I appreciate how compact it is. I'd love to have this as a regular load on my desktop. My only note would be that the precipitation graph feels unnecessarily bulky - wouldn't it work with the same type of horizontal graph seen for the ones below it? I know precipitation demands somewhat more precision and immediacy, but you could also do a variable graph - left half next hour, right half next 12 hours or something.
    • jsax 3 hours ago
      Thanks for the feedback!

      I agree, it’s definitely something to work on as it takes up a considerable amount of vertical space.

      I found the precipitation chart challenging as you need to present both the forecasted precipitation, and the potential likelihood of the precipitation occurring. Something I’ve considered is using a horizontal graph with different shades of grey through black in each bar to represent the probability, but it would somewhat reduce accessibility.

  • Gualdrapo 2 hours ago
    As other users pointed out, it'd be great if this could be curl'd like with wttr.in
  • 8ig8 3 hours ago
    Looks great. One thing that initially tripped me up, I searched "Raleigh, NC" and got no place found. "Raleigh" worked.
    • jsax 3 hours ago
      That’s frustrating, thank you for the feedback. I’ll take a look at improving the search and potentially switching out the API provider. I currently use open-meteo as I was already using it for the weather forecast (it has a great weather API), and it made sense at the time to keep with a single provider.
  • popalchemist 3 hours ago
    DIG IT. This is how the web used to feel.
  • benj111 2 hours ago
    Cool. There's unicode cloud characters. Would be nice to have a visual indication of rain/sun/cloudy etc
    • jsax 2 hours ago
      I love this idea. The brolly logo at the top of the page is also a unicode character, so this fits well.
  • leonpillow 2 hours ago
    would be great to show humidity %
    • jsax 2 hours ago
      I’ll definitely look at adding this in, along with potential the wet bulb temperature. Thanks for the feedback!
      • weatherphan 15 minutes ago
        This is a terrific project, thank you!

        Use-cases will vary widely. For example if I used Brolly for sailing, I'd want wind speed in kts and wind direction as well as dew point, and I'd want a recent timeseries of air pressure to give an idea of the synoptic-scale situation.

        Of course these may be far outside your original use-cases. I think when people get a hold of Brolly, they're going to love it immediately, and there will be a flood of feature requests. If that happens, might be good to design the layers needed for diverse customization.

      • johnthescott 1 hour ago
        +2 for humidity. great work. keep it simple.
  • Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago
    Really love this website and its awesome, thanks for making this!

    I really love Golang minimalist applications using sqlite. The whole architecture feels really elegant to me personally. I wish you luck for this project and if I may ask, is the project open source, I really love its UI :) ,it feels so cool!