I’ve been work­ing on mov­ing my hus­band’s weath­er data pages from our old host­ing sys­tem to our new host­ing sys­tem. As part of the new look I’m adding links to some of the sources of weath­er infor­ma­tion that he uses reg­u­lar­ly. One of these is the NOAA local fore­cast page. A few days after he sent me the URL he sent me an updat­ed one:

He writes:

I’d always kept a favorite link to the NOAA web site, where I get weath­er fore­casts. they have a lit­tle click­able map where you can click your spe­cif­ic loca­tion and get a spe­cif­ic fore­cast. but it’s a lit­tle map, and accu­ra­cy is dif­fi­cult, so I just clicked around ’til it said ‘5 miles east of duvall’ and fig­ured that was close enough. But no (OCD? me? not a chance, baby!). a few days ago I hap­pened to notice that the URL is obvi­ous­ly encod­ing the dec­i­mal lat-long in a sim­ple to read (and mod­i­fy!) format:
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/forecast/...
&textField1=47.7425&textField2=-121.98444
textField1 and textField2 are obvi­ous­ly lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude, in dec­i­mal for­mat. so I went to our local coun­ty GIS sys­tem, found my house, got the exact lat/long and cus­tomized the URL in my favorites fold­er. tada: a url that is cus­tomized ‘exact­ly’ for our loca­tion. not that it makes much dif­fer­ence, but it illus­trates the use­ful­ness of trans­par­ent URLs. 

Pret­ty slick huh? The URL is prob­a­bly not eas­i­ly read­able to most peo­ple to to a weath­er geek the lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude num­bers are both mean­ing­ful and recognizable.

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