It took a while since the previous feature update to Spincloud. I have done a number of upgrades to the underlying tech and some intensive code refactoring but nothing visible. The time has come for another eye candy: heat maps. It is a map overlay that shows a color-translated temperature layer based on interpolated values of the current weather conditions. It gives a quick indication of the average temperature across all land masses where data is available.

Naturally in areas where data is more dense, the visual representation is better. The toughest job was to figure-out the interpolation math. I still have to refine the algorithm currently based on the inverse distance weighting algorithm which interpolates scattered points on a surface. Apparently a better one to use is kriging but I have yet to implement it.
The temperature map is generated from current temperatures and is updated once every hour. You can toggle the overlay by clicking the “Temp” button found on the top of the active map area.

I launched Spincloud on New Year’s day. I didn’t expect a flood of traffic to hit the site since -let’s face it- there was nothing groundbreaking. Spincloud was born from my idea of having access to the world weather in one step or less and I’m pleased with the results so far. Spincloud gains adoption every day and this is only due to the people that saw something new and exciting in it. There are blog posts, traffic graphs and other goodies to talk about so let’s begin.

I announced spincloud’s launch on my personal blog then Keir from googlemapsmania broke the news to the community. And so the first spike of traffic was logged on Jan 2nd. 

Then followed a month of relative silence during which I took a much needed break from the project. I couldn’t help but refactoring and cleaning-up the code a bit. I had two minor releases deployed in prod in the mean time and everything went smooth.

I had a new feature I wanted to have online before the initial release, the meteoalarm mashup that displays weather warnings across Europe but chose not to delay it (a Good Decision in hindsight) . I started working on it by mid January , did a lot of digging for administrative borders data then getting the meteoalarm warning data right (those guys don’t have any integration point). I was done two weeks later.

In the mean time I was trying to raise the awareness about spincloud. I submitted the site so some mapping/mashup themed websites, improved the indexing (still working on it). Then Wednesday last week the European bloggers finally found it. UK’s Mapperz ran a nice little story that seems to have set the things in motion. A number of other bloggers picked-up the story and a surprisingly good feedback came from Italy: Matteo and italiasw.com did a great job while  gisdk.blogspot.com of Denmark  noticed the RSS facilities. Then the referral machine kicked in,  killerstartups.com, programmableweb.com amongst the sites linking. And thus the second spike registered on the traffic meter:

This one was three times bigger than the first spike and it was yet again all thanks to the blogger community that saw something useful in spincloud.

Things are looking up.  There are a few sites in Asia following spincloud: drchoi.or.kr and wangtam.com and I see that 16 people linked to spincloud on delicious. Yey!

The traffic tripled on an average from last month and I’m delighted. The server hums happily for now and I have all reasons to keep it that way.

Huzzah!

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Update Nov.25.2009: The twitter name has changed to @meteo_alarm. Please update your bookmark or follow list.

Between code refactoring and cooking new ideas, I took some time to add a new feature to Spincloud. Inspired by the crowd-sourced weather updates triggered by really bad snow storms in the UK, I (finally) started to see the advantages to using Twitter. So I took the Meteoalarm data that I mashed-up on Spincloud’s map and streamed it to Twitter.

So here it is: Meteoalarm on Twitter via Spincloud = @Meteoalarm @Meteo_alarm. The stream is updated twice a day and it presents a concise text-only representation of the color encoded weather warnings  in Europe for today and tomorrow.

I’m a bit of a news junkie and when I heard that a twitter stream called @BreakingNewsOn existed I did the natural geekish thing, mash it up. Yahoo pipes was my friend here. I haven’t used the Pipes before but that didn’t quite matter, Yahoo did a great job keeping this playgroundsy product in the child realm so even a caveman could do it. The mashup result -two pipe connections later- is beyond the link:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/newsplore/breakingnewson

I started working on Spincloud back in 2003 when I got interested in regular expressions. I liked them so much I started looking for large sets of freely available data that I could crunch. Weather data was quite appealing; not only I’d parse it but I could get instant feedback by just looking at the parsed data, after all we understand temperatures and wind speeds and the like. I’d get to use other technologies I couldn’t experiment at work where I was doing the regular J2EE stuff and I kept feeling the itch to do new things.

And so Spincloud was born; it’s mission: to track the weather worldwide. It didn’t have a name back then but as things started to shape-up, I realized that the experiment was slowly turning into a real project. Then Google published its Maps API and I just knew that my small little pet project just found the perfect playground. It’s been a while since I started with this and I had no intention of publishing it initially. It has grown beyond its initial purpose and I feel it’s time to set it free.

This is the third version of Spincloud, the first two iterations were not publicly released. This is not an open source project; however, I’m planning on blogging about the technical challenges I’m encountering and are interesting enough to share.

Here are the main features of Spincloud:

Update: googlemapsmania.com just ran a story about Spincloud here. Thanks guys!