Live from Dorset / journal / hicksdesign

17/11/03

Live from Dorset

Last weekend I came across a rather nice blog, Dunstans Blog (who also runs 1976Design), via a link at the CSS Vault. Apart from an appealing clean layout, the site has an addictive feature – a ‘live weather image’ from his house in Dorset. This takes the form of a beautiful atmospheric illustration that gets updated, depending on type of the weather and time of day.

It adds real warmth to the site – its one of those ‘good ideas, well executed’ that I wish I’d thought of first (Then again, the view from my window ain’t quite as pretty). I can’t help looking every few hours to see if the weather is any better in Dorset than Oxfordshire.

(Sorry about the weather obsession – its an British thing).

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Comments are now closed, but you can still have a jolly time reading what others have left:

Scrivs said 1878 days ago:

Hmmm, I never see any sun everytime I go. I have been to England twice and I remember who cloudy it always was. Is there ever any sun there?

Jon HIcks said 1878 days ago:

We get our fair share, but not today. Its like living in 'Bladerunner'. Always dark, always raining...

David said 1878 days ago:

Jeez, yeah. Rained all day today, and I was outside playing hockey for two hours as well. It gets dark around half four also, which is kinda sucky. But hey.

David said 1878 days ago:

On another point (sorry, forgot to add this :$) I came across the same blog a few days before on web-graphics' blogroll. Great blog, made it straight into my bookmarks toolbar folder.

Dris said 1878 days ago:

Wow, it's very nice! I'm inspired... I had about three ideas just seeing that.

ak said 1877 days ago:

unfortunately that site makes the bandwidth challenged cry..

Dunstan said 1877 days ago:

Ak - I know what you mean about the bandwidth, I'm on a 56k dial-up as well, and normally I wouldn't stick a huge image in a site like that, but after going to all the trouble of making 49 different versions of that image there was no way I was going to save them in a lossey format. JPEGs just made the sky look nasty.

If you visit a few times then the common images become cached and everything works fine - I don't experience any probs now.

But yes, I hear you :o)

David said 1877 days ago:

49? Wow. I expected 7 or so.

Jon HIcks said 1877 days ago:

If you look at the colophon page:

http://www.1976design.com/blog/colophon/

It has links to day and night folders, where you can see all the images!