Hi, I’m Simon Madine and I make digital toys and write guides on web development.
I'm a senior web dev and evangelist for Nokia Maps in Berlin.
All too often, I have ideas which might make a cool website or iPhone app or whatever and I know I just don't have the time to build them. I'm going to post them here in the hope that someone else might find a use for them. These ideas might already be in existence, of course. I'm not claiming they are unique in any way (although some might be).
You are free to take these ideas and do whatever you like with them. Of course, if they become amazingly successful, I could do with a bigger TV...
If you wake up every morning and think, "My t-shirts are so dull, I wish I had interesting clothes...", you need to have a look at my online shop.
So, I couldn't help myself. I had a niggling idea at the back of my head that I needed to get out. After coming up with this Twitter weather idea last week, I decided to spend a couple of hours this weekend building it. As if I didn't have other things I should have been doing instead...
It works pretty much exactly how the pseudocode I mentioned last time describes. Every few minutes, a script will search Twitter for mentions of any weather words from several different languages. It will then look up the location of the person who tweeted that and store it. Single reports might be wrong and users might not have stored their actual location but over a large enough sample, this system becomes more accurate. The script removes any matching twets older than 6 hours.
To display, I actually ended up using Geohashes instead of Geotudes because it is easier to simplify them when you zoom out just by cutting off the tail of the hash. For example, the physical area denoted by gcvwr3qvmh8vn (the geohash for Edinburgh) is contained within gcvwr3 which is itself contained within gcv. There are a few technical problems with geohashes but it seems the best fit for this purpose. If anyone knows of any better suggestion, please let me know. I do realise that this is quite possibly the slowest, most inefficient JavaScript I've ever written because it makes an AJAX call for every graticule and it probably should just send the South-East and North-West bounds and get back an array of them but, like I said, there were other things I should have been doing. Because the overlaid grid changes resolution based on zoom level, there are a few places where it is either tragically slow (resolution too fine) or terribly inaccurate (resolution too rough). That's just a case of tweaking the algorithm. Similarly, it's set to display reports of weather if there are 2 or more matches but it could be tweaked to only show if a larger number have reported something.
So go, play with the Twitter-generated weather map. If someone can come up with a good, catchy name, or some better graphics, that'd be great, thanks.
