In the spirit of "shipping it", I wanted to share this quick project that I made for myself and my friends: http://derefnull.org/wx
As an avid skydiver, I regularly check wind forecasts for multiple drop zones to determine which location is most suitable for the day of jumping. I was tired of manually entering each location each time I checked the weather forecast, so I created this app to simplify the process.
This web app will render multiple wind-speed forecasts on a single page for comparison. Once locations are entered in, the user can return to the page and refresh the forecast with a single click.
The locations are validated with the Google Geocode API, stored in a client-side cookie (jquery.cookie), and rendered with Raphael JS. Weather forecasts are provided by weather.gov. Additional UI goodies use twitter bootstrap and some custom scripting as glue.
Note: this was written a modern browser (tested with apple safari, and google chrome, IE 10)
Next iteration : client side app-building is fun, but I think I can improve response time by moving much of the weather.gov queries server-side. This will also allow me to add a slick "share these locations" feature to the app.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me [Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/28.0.1500.71 Chrome/28.0.1500.71 Safari/537.36]
JS console says:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'firstChild' of null derefnull.org/wx/:290
doParseWxXml derefnull.org/wx/:290
forecastAsync_Update derefnull.org/wx/:148
c jquery.js:4
p.fireWith jquery.js:4
k jquery.js:6
r jquery.js:6
Strange -- was that for a US-based location? I just tested it in windows based firefox & debian based iceweasel and it seemed to work ok. I don't have a Ubuntu system handy at the moment.
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[ 4399 ms ] story [ 888 ms ] threadAs an avid skydiver, I regularly check wind forecasts for multiple drop zones to determine which location is most suitable for the day of jumping. I was tired of manually entering each location each time I checked the weather forecast, so I created this app to simplify the process.
This web app will render multiple wind-speed forecasts on a single page for comparison. Once locations are entered in, the user can return to the page and refresh the forecast with a single click.
The app is nearly all client side, which is a new paradigm for me. The only server side component is a proxy script I made to get around a browser-side issue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing)
The locations are validated with the Google Geocode API, stored in a client-side cookie (jquery.cookie), and rendered with Raphael JS. Weather forecasts are provided by weather.gov. Additional UI goodies use twitter bootstrap and some custom scripting as glue.
Note: this was written a modern browser (tested with apple safari, and google chrome, IE 10)
Next iteration : client side app-building is fun, but I think I can improve response time by moving much of the weather.gov queries server-side. This will also allow me to add a slick "share these locations" feature to the app.
JS console says:
I've just tried it with two locations in the US and it works with no errors. If I add to them a location in Europe there's an error: