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

(brolly.sh)

62 points | by jsax 3 hours ago

12 comments

  • goodmythical 2 minutes 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)
  • Gualdrapo 2 minutes ago
    As other users pointed out, it'd be great if this could be curl'd like with wttr.in
  • jonahx 21 minutes 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 15 minutes 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 13 minutes 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 9 minutes ago
          Interesting, I’d have naively assumed that’d be cached after first load by Chrome. Definitely one to investigate further.
          • hahahaa 1 minute 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 18 minutes ago
      Weird, on my iPhone it loaded instantly.
  • speerer 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.
  • firasd 1 hour 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."

  • kachnuv_ocasek 1 hour ago
    How do you turn on the text-only mode? I've tried Accept: text/plain but I always get HTML.
    • wormpilled 1 hour ago
    • raajg 1 hour ago
      Don't think it's 'true' plain text. HTML/CSS rendering 'like' plain text.

      Still beautiful though!

      • goodmythical 6 minutes ago
        curling it (with the relevant link from browser because locations are encoded in the URL rather than plain like wettr.in) shows html
  • Imustaskforhelp 7 minutes 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!

  • devindotcom 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

  • 8ig8 1 hour ago
    Looks great. One thing that initially tripped me up, I searched "Raleigh, NC" and got no place found. "Raleigh" worked.
    • jsax 55 minutes 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.
  • leonpillow 25 minutes ago
    would be great to show humidity %
    • jsax 22 minutes ago
      I’ll definitely look at adding this in, along with potential the wet bulb temperature. Thanks for the feedback!
  • popalchemist 1 hour ago
    DIG IT. This is how the web used to feel.