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

(brolly.sh)

59 points | by jsax 4 hours ago ago

15 comments

  • jonahx 7 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 a minute 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.

    • bigmattystyles 4 minutes ago

      Weird, on my iPhone it loaded instantly.

  • speerer an 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 an 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 an 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."

  • leonpillow 11 minutes ago

    would be great to show humidity %

    • jsax 9 minutes ago

      I’ll definitely look at adding this in, along with potential the wet bulb temperature. Thanks for the feedback!

  • 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.

  • devindotcom an 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 an 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 an hour ago

    Looks great. One thing that initially tripped me up, I searched "Raleigh, NC" and got no place found. "Raleigh" worked.

  • popalchemist an hour ago

    DIG IT. This is how the web used to feel.