The weather and the phase of the moon, in ascii, as services

March 17, 2021 10:28 AM

Visit wttr.in (or curl it) to get the weather where you are
Visit wttr.in/somewhere to get the weather somewhere
Visit wttr.in/moon to get the phase of the moon.
This website turns wego and pyphoon into services.
Thanks, @schachmat and Igor Chubin!
posted by Going To Maine (15 comments total)

telnet rainmaker.wunderground.com
posted by maggieb at 11:13 AM on March 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

I love this. I have to share this with all my retro computing peeps.

telnet rainmaker.wunderground.com

I was hitting weather underground when it was telnet downwind.spell.umich.edu 8888
posted by MrGuilt at 11:19 AM on March 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

wttr.in is awesome; I access it for the weather description of my local area to go along with data presented by a personal weather station, and them stuff it all into the status bar of i3wm.

One thing I've noticed is that access is capped based on total requests over a day, so the site sometimes becomes unavailable in the afternoons (or after any period of heavy usage) to control costs.
posted by jquinby at 11:21 AM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

That's no moon....
posted by chavenet at 11:33 AM on March 17, 2021

Looks like shit in 80×24, as it assumes a 125 column terminal.
posted by scruss at 11:51 AM on March 17, 2021

this is so pleasant!
posted by dismas at 12:01 PM on March 17, 2021

aesthetically, i mean.
posted by dismas at 12:39 PM on March 17, 2021

Visit wttr.in/somewhere to get the weather somewhere

somewhere is, apparently, not a US ZIP code, because:

$ curl https://wttr.in/95127

[snip]

Location: Picanello-Ognina-Barriera-Canalicchio, Catania, Sicilia, 95127, Italia [37.51097248095238,15.098127652380951]
posted by hanov3r at 1:08 PM on March 17, 2021

Unfortunately the Dark Sky API it uses by default will go away around the end of the year. I'm going to miss my custom display of the bearing and distance to summer t-storms..
posted by joeyh at 1:13 PM on March 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Not gonna lie, when promised "the weather of the moon," I expected something different.
posted by benbenson at 9:21 AM on March 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Unfortunately the Dark Sky API it uses by default will go away around the end of the year. I'm going to miss my custom display of the bearing and distance to summer t-storms..

I think wttr.in uses WorldWeather Online's API.

In either case, Darksky's API going away sucks. Fortunately there are some other sources out there, some of which are free if you have a personal weather station that can feed them (I do this with PWSWeather and Aerisweather).
posted by jquinby at 9:38 AM on March 18, 2021

Apparently here in Cleveland we're going to have a blizzard tonight.
posted by kathrynm at 10:46 AM on March 18, 2021

I like it a lot for aesthetics and being a lightweight web service. Sad that a (quick peek at code) screen reader will be stymied by lack of metadata and mixing formatting/semantic content. Looks like they take pull requests, hmmm.
posted by backsaw at 6:55 AM on March 19, 2021

We did not have a blizzard.
posted by kathrynm at 3:07 PM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

I went on a craigslist date with a Java developer who worked at Weather Underground. He talked incessantly the whole evening and I never got a word in edgewise.

That's why I don't use wundergound - I'm a fan of WTForecast.
posted by bendy at 2:25 AM on March 31, 2021