weather
Weather is the state of the atmosphere at a place and time as regards heat, dryness, sunshine, wind, rain, etc.
Weather can be an attribute of a post, a log of a passive experience, or an entity.
Why
Posting weather information on your website lets you show your readers the current environmental conditions in which you live. This may help them empathize with you over the weather.
Sharing your weather information may reduce the number of people who ask "how is the weather?" Even if people ask this question, you can point them to your website for detailed information.
How
APIs
There are many free weather APIs available that provide accurate data covering:
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Current weather conditions (i.e. rain, snow)
- Forecasts
These APIs include Dark Sky (not accepting new signups), the Met Office API, the Raspberry Pi Weather Station API.
Advantages
- Historical data is readily available
- Weather APIs provide data on points that are difficult to collect on a home weather station (i.e. forecasts)
- ...
Disadvantages
- Some APIs like OpenWeatherMap restrict their APIs to certain endpoints for unpaid consumers
- See API criticism
Home Weather Station
Hosting a weather station at home is an option. A home weather station will let you collect information that is specific to your home, rather than data on your city from an API.
The Raspberry Pi Sense HAT is a good sensor to start working with if you are new to weather data and want to dip your toes into a home weather station.
Advantages
- Complete ownership over your weather data
- You can collect only the metrics you need
- You do not need to depend on silos (Dark Sky shut down)
Disadvantages
- You will need to buy your own sensors
- Setting up sensors may require some hardware knowledge
- Verifying the integrity of your data is difficult
- If a weather station is not correctly positioned, the weather data may be inaccurate.
IndieWeb Examples
Calum Ryan
Calum Ryan displays weather and temperature information per post as of 2016-05-28.
Christian Weiske
His website's background color changes with time of day and weather conditions. Explanation.
Jeremy Keith
Jeremy Keith displays a weather icon next to the location of the post.
Eddie Hinkle
Eddie Hinkle displayed weather and temperature information per post as of 2017-12-28 by fetching it from Dark Sky API as part of his 2018-01-01 Commitment. Adding Weather to my Site
He also has added some important historical weather to posts
Eddie also uses his current location and the weather from that location to add weather effects to his homepage. as of 2018-11-15 he supports displaying animated snow if it is snowing at his current location.
Aaron Parecki
Aaron Parecki displays weather and temperature information per post as of 2017-12-30.
Daniel Goldsmith
Daniel Goldsmith has been including current weather and temperature on his site since 2018-01-13. He also posted a description of the process and the resources used to enable this functionality
Jonathan LaCour
Jonathan LaCour displays weather details based upon his current location on all posts as of 2019-01-16. Jonathan is using the Dark Sky API.
Attribute
Aaron Parecki stores weather data from an external source and has a pending issue for p3k to add weather data along with location data for posts.
Passive Post
Weather can be the logging of a passive experience as a post on a site.
Entity
An entire site can be for an entity, such as a weather station.
Brainstorming
weather info on posts
The simplest use case for weather data is attached to a post of any type. This adds additional context to a post.
Example: Picture of Snowpocalypse...with the context of location and temperature.
Possible items in need of markup
- Temperature
- Relative Humidity
- Barometric Pressure
- Rainfall
- Windspeed and direction
- p-temperature - Temperature
- p-humidity - Humidity
- p-weather - A textual description of the weather
weather info on homepage
Tantek Çelik: I kinda want different modifiers to my site icon depending on weather condition, like, a 😷 for bad air, a cap for cold weather etc., perhaps seasonal icon decorations.
weather info on a separate page
capjamesg displayed his weather information on a subdomain on his site.
For weather overviews (i.e. just the temperature) then displaying weather data on every page on a site may make the most sense. For setups that collect more advanced data, weather information could appear on a separate page so as not to distract users.
silo examples
UK Snow Map collates tweets with #uksnow in and location (by postcode or geotag) and snow intensity from 0-10
There is a small and dedicated community of weather enthusiasts that are contributing data to sites such as Weather Underground. From the entity point of view, there is an opportunity for this data to appear as a useful activity stream. example of weathwr station posting
See Also
- Good UI examples: Dark Sky, https://www.metoffice.gov.uk
- Dark Sky API is closed for new submissions: https://blog.darksky.net/dark-sky-has-a-new-home/
- Raspberry Pi Sense HAT tutorial: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started-with-the-sense-hat/7
- Building a Weather Station by capjamesg
- Cool design example for displaying an archive summary of temperatures across posts: https://showyourstripes.info/ (looks a lot like Dopplr's trip stripes)
- Adding Weather effects