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.

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dabluecaboose 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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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ranger207 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hey, I have a script for updating my background too! I'm not archiving the old images though, but I've thought about it to make some cool animations

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dabluecaboose 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Hah originally making an animation was my plan, but as so often happens it fell on the backburner and then I ended up with a massive archive. I just deleted it once I realized that A) Better archives exist elsewhere and B) I wasn't going to do anything with it.

I still have the script somewhere. I should throw an LLM at it and see if I can't sand off a few rough edges.

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mthoms 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It would be great if an LLM could be trained to generate interpolated images between the 10m intervals of the full disk geocolor product. The animations would be fantastic.

I've got about 2.5 years worth of that imagery if someone knows a good way to do this on a budget.

	▲	zanecodes 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I doubt you need an LLM for that, a diffusion model or perhaps even a deep CNN could probably do a passable job. You could train it by taking consecutive triplets of images [A, B, C] and providing [A, C] as inputs with B as the expected output.

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getpost 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's an app that updates the desktop https://downlinkapp.com/

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iberator 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

make torrent of it

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xd1936 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe if the UX was nicer, you wouldn't need to write scrapers and parsers and could just use their site.

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dabluecaboose 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We don't need a bloated React framework to show a plaintext file with the fuel tank levels. It's NOAA, not Microsoft.

	▲	irishcoffee 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> We don't need a bloated React framework Could have stopped there for 99% of websites

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jefftk 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They're scraping to automatically update the wallpaper on their desktop. That's not something a website can do, even with fantastic UX.

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lightedman 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"That's not something a website can do, even with fantastic UX."

Actually, I used to have a live-updating website AS MY BACKGROUND. Windows 98 and Me, website used AJAX and Comet to make it happen.

You used to be able to set websites as your desktop background.

	▲	queuebert 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm sure that was 100% secure, too. /s (I did the same thing back then.)

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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kube-system 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	dylan604 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sites like NASA's APOD have not changed by design. So many third parties have been built up around sites that any change [w\|c]ould break so much for no effective gain. Same holds true when people ask why things like NOTAMs and even NOAA's alerts are formatted the way they are.

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queuebert 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The link OP submitted appears to be a webpage displaying a screenshot of another web page, and the image aspect ratio has been altered. It's so comically bad it had to be on purpose, or someone is doing their web dev in MS Word.

Edit: I think actually it's a screenshot of a screenshot even, and this appears to be the entire design of spaceweather.gov. What in the holy heck is going on there? This has to be a top 10 worst website designs of all time.

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bityard 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lots of the web still looks like this when you step outside the comfort zone of big tech search engines, content streaming sites, and social media.

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pdntspa 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why must everything look and be modern

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Peanuts99 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The counter to this is the UK.Gov website. Very simple and basic, modern (maybe) but very accessible. Government websites should put accessibility over everything else.

	▲	red_admiral an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They even have their own design system and CSS framework: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/get-started/

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kevin_thibedeau 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.