Where's Hot Now?
Find out where's hot right now around the world
The original site pulled weather data from the BBC using yahoo (I think). At some point this feed stopped working and the site went through a period of neglect.
I decided to rebuild the site using the DarkSky API - and a more modern tech stack. So I swapped out the old Java and JSPs for React, TypeScript, NextJS and Styled Components. I use GitHub actions, and deploy to Zeit.
The site still looks pretty much the same though...
I struggled to find weather icons that I liked - so in a monumental yak shaving exercise I decided to design my own.
The BBC weather feed had pretty fine grained forecasts - it has 5 different categories for snow - so I had to create 24 different icons.
Thankfully DarkSky has less categories and most of them mapped fairly well to my existing icons - but I am missing an icon for 'wind'. Unfortunately last time I used a graphics application was Macromedia Fireworks (RIP 😢) and so this may take some time to add.
In 2012 I published them in a repo on github:
I'm not sure how long the site had been running for at this point - but I signed up for a twitter account @whereshotnow and started posting on an adhoc basis any destinations that had good weather...
It would appear i also started using tumblr as well...
https://whereshotnow-blog.tumblr.com/
Sometime mid 2006 I had launched a flight comparison site (that sadly no longer exists) - and I wanted ideas for where I could fly to, so I came up with the idea of building a companion application to help myself and others find destinations to fly to.
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