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Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site (brolly.sh)

228 points by jsax ↗ HN
The UK MET office recently redesigned their site, adding a lot of additional whitespace, scrolling, and animations. This significantly reduced its usability for me, and left me wanting an ‘at a glance’ weather site.

I made https://brolly.sh, a minimalist, plain text weather forecasting site. You can use it to view weather from around the world, with: 7 day forecast; Previous day log (so you can confirm it definitely was cooler / hotter / wetter / drier yesterday!); Hourly rain, wind, temperature, conditions; Hourly UV, air quality and pollen, including pollen type specific forecasts within the EU / UK; Location search and last 5 locations; Location specific units.

I mostly made the site for myself, if anyone else also benefits from it that’s an added advantage.

You can check out the weather in York, UK at https://brolly.sh/forecast/RWFP2qW8, or search for a location at https://brolly.sh

The site is deliberately styled as a single long scrollable column, to work on mobile phones. You can view it on desktop too, there's just a lot of horizontal padding. I naturally took a lot of inspiration from plaintextsports.com. Despite not being a sports fan, I love its aesthetic. But, you'll hopefully see that this site isn't a rip off, and has its own deliberate look and feel.

Visualisations are really important to showing information at a glance. I spent a lot of time designing the different visualisations and making them work with only characters. My favourite is the hourly heat map used for pollen count.

It's also frustrating to have an interactive site, where you can't share a page with a friend and have them see what you're seeing. To solve this, all page state (i.e. location, selected day, expanded / collapsed sections), is stored in the URL. You can share or bookmark the specific view, and know that you'll always be able to come back to it.

The site uses PocketBase. It’s written in Go and plain HTML/JavaScript/CSS. All pages are backend rendered, with light JavaScript to handle re-loading content without page jumps when using interactive features like next / previous day navigation. Weather forecasts are fetched from open-meteo.com, which has a very generous free tier. However, I also built a custom LRU cache on top of PocketBase’s SQLite DB to cache forecasts for 5 minutes, and avoid putting unnecessary pressure on the open-meteo API.

44 comments

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kachnuv_ocasek
How do you turn on the text-only mode? I've tried Accept: text/plain but I always get HTML.
devindotcom
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.
speerer
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!
firasd
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."

8ig8
Looks great. One thing that initially tripped me up, I searched "Raleigh, NC" and got no place found. "Raleigh" worked.
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jonahx
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.
Imustaskforhelp
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!

goodmythical
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
As other users pointed out, it'd be great if this could be curl'd like with wttr.in
benj111
Cool. There's unicode cloud characters. Would be nice to have a visual indication of rain/sun/cloudy etc
walthamstow
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?
bluebarbet
Seems like a good use case for Unicode weather symbols.
sssilver
Thank you so much for this. It's fantastic.

Can we have METARs for airport codes in this exact aesthetic?

karteum
FWIW, I vibe-coded https://meteo.karteum.ovh/ a few months ago for my own use-case (it interfaces with open-meteo.com. Click in the map to add points, and click in the point to get details)
smnscu
I was thoroughly confused at why the website was showing the weather for York. Since I studied there (and it's straight up a lovely place), I visit quite often and subsequently check the weather. I thought I had set it but couldn't remember doing so. As someone else said, this being text-based makes it particularly digestible to LLMs. Out of curiosity, I looked up weather MCPs and stumbled upon this: https://github.com/weather-mcp/weather-mcp
winterscott
This is actually a great format for LLM consumption too.

Structured, concise weather information without unnecessary UI noise is much easier for agents to parse and summarize.

A JSON endpoint or an MCP server on top of this would be an interesting extension.

bl4kers
I don't see a way to change from F to C...?
ji_reilly
It's already saved to home screen. Love the simple text interface.
hliyan
Thoughts about serving pure text (not HTML) so that someone can pull this using a curl command, awk the output and do various things with it? Wish more sites did that.
rlopezcc
I `curl wttr.in` pretty much every day.
leetrout
ICAO slugs for quick lookup would be awesome. e.g. brolly.sh/kjfk
dash2
Searching for and clicking on Sheringham gives a 400 error.