Improvements to Chilly Weather. Thank you Station! 🛰

2022-03-2 | #weather #cgi

A few days ago, I launched Chilly Weather, a fun, streamlined Gemini weather service

⛄️ Chilly Weather: A Gemini weather service

Gemlog post announcing Chilly Weather

I also posted it to Station, where I got some tremendous feedback:

Station thread about Chilly Weather

I haven't been a big user of Station, but this really made me appreciate the value of a fast, Gemini-native social network where you can get quick responses to something. Thanks to ~justyb, ~bie, ~gnuserland, ~steve, ~samurai, ~smokey, ~november, ~comatoast and ~kelbot

Based on all their feedback, I made several improvements:

• You can now search for a location to get weather. Chilly Weather gets a forecast for a location by by geolocating the incoming client IP address. Often that's great, and its only less thing the user has to type. But some Gemini users are using VPNs, or their ISP is not otherwise located near them. Now users can search for a specify location, or see weather for places other than their current location.
• 24 hour clock! Chilly Weather now shows 24 hour time when displaying metric units, and 12 hour when displaying imperial.
• Switching units. Chilly Weather auto-detects the units to use by country you are looking at for weather. Again, I did this to simplify the interface. The vast majority of the time, this is what you want, and it's what Chilly Weather does by default. However if you use one unit, but are looking up temperatures for a country that uses another, you are stuck. So I add a

(and again, let me repeat, what a terrible, horrible monster you are for expressing human-range temperatures Celcius)

The search for the geolocation service (which converts a search like 'London' into a city/distinct/country and lon/lat) is fair. Building my search engine Kennedy taught me a lot about how you need to normalize and expand the input you get from a user when searching. It works, but I think its the weakest part of the service. Let me know if you have an problems or have an suggestions or feedback.

⛄️ Chilly Weather: A Gemini weather service