Dry Rock is a website designed to help climbers in Ireland find some dry rock to climb on. Check it out at dryrock.ie.
The forecast data is sourced from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.
As a rock climber I am perpetually thinking about my next weekend trip and trying to decide where looks like the driest place to go. This leads to a lot of time spent checking forecasts for the various climbing areas in Ireland. As every programmer knows when a task gets boring and repetitive, you automate it! So that's what I did.
The site runs a python script at regular intervals. The script retrieves forecast data from MET Norway's weather API, collates it and renders it into a single page. This leaves me with a single web page to check before deciding where to go at the weekend.
While I have not designed this project to be used by others you are more than welcome to, however please see the licensing notes below.
The gist of how to set up the project is as follows;
- Fork this repository
- Update the 'setup.cfg' file, particularly the 'user_agent' section under the 'metno-locationforecast' header
- Update the '/data/input/places.csv/' file with the places that are of interest to you
- Setup GitHub Pages for your repository
Hey presto! Your site should be live and will update ever hour using GitHub workflows.
Also of interest, if you would like to build a similar type of site, is the metno-locationforecast library. It makes it super easy for a python application to retrieve data from the MET Norway API.
While this code is covered by an MIT licence and is free to use, the data collected from MET Norway is subject to it's own terms of service. In particular they require that any app requesting information from their API identifies itself correctly and so simply copying this site and requesting data as if you are this site is a violation of their terms of use. Check MET Norway's website for further details.