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

(brolly.sh)

84 points | by jsax 4 hours ago

14 comments

  • walthamstow 13 minutes 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 3 minutes 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.

  • speerer 2 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 2 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 27 minutes 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
  • firasd 2 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 4 minutes ago
      Yes, I'm very annoyed that I cannot look at historical data (even from the past couple of days) in weather websites!
  • jonahx 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
          Interesting, I’d have naively assumed that’d be cached after first load by Chrome. Definitely one to investigate further.
          • hahahaa 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
      Weird, on my iPhone it loaded instantly.
  • goodmythical 1 hour 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)
  • kachnuv_ocasek 2 hours ago
    How do you turn on the text-only mode? I've tried Accept: text/plain but I always get HTML.
    • wormpilled 2 hours ago
    • raajg 2 hours ago
      Don't think it's 'true' plain text. HTML/CSS rendering 'like' plain text.

      Still beautiful though!

      • goodmythical 1 hour 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 2 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 2 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 1 hour ago
    As other users pointed out, it'd be great if this could be curl'd like with wttr.in
  • 8ig8 2 hours ago
    Looks great. One thing that initially tripped me up, I searched "Raleigh, NC" and got no place found. "Raleigh" worked.
    • jsax 1 hour 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 2 hours ago
    DIG IT. This is how the web used to feel.
  • leonpillow 1 hour ago
    would be great to show humidity %
    • jsax 1 hour ago
      I’ll definitely look at adding this in, along with potential the wet bulb temperature. Thanks for the feedback!
      • johnthescott 13 minutes ago
        +2 for humidity. great work. keep it simple.
  • benj111 54 minutes ago
    Cool. There's unicode cloud characters. Would be nice to have a visual indication of rain/sun/cloudy etc
    • jsax 53 minutes ago
      I love this idea. The brolly logo at the top of the page is also a unicode character, so this fits well.
  • Imustaskforhelp 1 hour 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!