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Comment by mutagen | Hacker News Reader

I miss the old WeatherSpark visualization of past conditions and the future forecast.

They had a wonderful graph of various weather parameters in a nice slippy zoom interface that made it easy to visualize the forecast. It was built in Flash and they decided that a HTML version wasn't viable due to declining ad revenue.

Some appreciation and screenshots of the old version:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sad-day-weatherspark-dashboar...

https://flowingdata.com/2011/03/14/weatherspark-for-more-gra...

https://www.reddit.com/r/weather/comments/4hkbq4/rest_in_pea...

https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pubs/fulltext/2016/20160004.pdf - The interface was even noted in a NOAA paper.

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Yeah, those were good times indeed. I try not to think too much about just how many hours/days/weeks/months I spent writing creatively cached Flash graph drawing to get the silky smooth pan & zoom behavior the dashboard offered.

But while lord Google is amazing at indexing SEOd text content, they aren't (weren't?) very good at feeding traffic to a tool with effectively no text. How could they know it was a good way to view the forecast for San Francisco without having a dedicated weathespark.com/forecast/san_francisco page with a decent amount of text along the lines of "forecast", "ten day forecast", "temperature", "precipitation", "rain", etc?

We did try to do something like that but Google never picked it up - while many people loved the dashboard, as a fraction of overall forecast consumers it was probably quite tiny, so I can't say I blame them ;)

Searching for any recipe shows the same paperclip-maximizing-gone-amok do-not-want SEO trap: I don't care about some made-up story about how this ratatouille makes you think of summers at grandma's garden. That's all empty word-calories best left for the writers at pixar. Something truly revolutionary would be if google ranked recipe sites by higher recipe-to-fluff ratios.

Thanks for developing all the stuff at weatherspark. It's one of my favorite practical examples of compact visualization done right.

Thank you so much for that, I miss it terribly but understand that it wasn't worth the effort. It was beautiful while it lasted. (and this map is super cool too)

That dashboard was gold. RIP.

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