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venzaspatoday at 2:13 PM4 repliesview on HN

As an aside, I'm always surprised how US Gov websites look like they've been made in Dreamweaver in about 2006. Not even seemingly with a emphasis on usability either.


Replies

dabluecaboosetoday at 2:29 PM

While it may not be flashy, I personally find the GOES sites extremely useful. Things are often simply placed at obvious and expected URLs, so scraping or monitoring is extremely easy.

I wrote the script that provides the GOES NavSum [1] and it pretty much just builds a standardized text file and drops it in the folder. The neat thing is that this makes it really easy to programmatically scrape and parse the data.

I wrote a personal script at one point that would download the GOES-EAST CONUS image and both EAST and WEST full disk images and composite them into a wallpaper. At one point my server had 500GB of archived GOES imagery. I liked to joke with my former coworkers that I could report image anomalies before they notice because my desktop wallpaper would change every 10 minutes.

[1] https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/resources/cemscs/navsum.txt

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kube-systemtoday at 2:19 PM

The ones that look old are old. The USG has newer design systems that you'll see used on many of the websites that have been redesigned more recently: https://designsystem.digital.gov/

This admin gutted both NOAAs budget and workforce so a website redesign is probably low priority at the moment.

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kevin_thibedeautoday at 4:47 PM

You can thank AccuWeather for nerfing any funding for site modernization. I'm surprised the tiled radar map hasn't had the Biden performance fixes reverted.

pdntspatoday at 3:34 PM

Why must everything look and be modern