Over the past week or so I have started working on a new project called ZipWeather. The idea for this came from my general attitude of not caring about the weather very often. As someone who spends a considerable amount of time indoors, the conditions outside are of little consequence to me. While this holds true most of the time, there are still those rare occasions where I would like to know what the weather is. The problem with this I have found is that every weather website out there is overly complicated and cluttered with advertisements. When I want the weather, I want it fast and I just want the important information (for instance , I really don’t need to know if tonight is a full moon or when high tide is on Thursday).

Noticing a problem, I’ve set out to solve it, or at least attempt to. ZipWeather is a lightweight Python web application written using the Flask development framework. The idea is, you can go to the ZipWeather website and put /yourzipcode and get the weather right away. No waiting for the front page to load, no complicated URLs, and most importantly, no banner ads. Right now, I have a development server running on http://limbo.csh.rit.edu:8001 for people to play with. For example, if you wanted to know the weather in Rochester, NY, you would go to http://limbo.csh.rit.edu:8001/14623

Once I have more features implemented, I will be purchasing a domain name to further simplify the process. Let me know what you like, what you hate and what you’d like to see in this application. You can also check out the code on GitHub at https://github.com/sdubois/ZipWeather