The UK MET office's recent redesign added excessive whitespace and animations, reducing usability. In response, the creator built brolly.sh, a minimalist plain-text weather forecasting site for York and global locations. It offers a 7 day forecast, previous day logs, hourly rain, wind, temperature, UV, air quality, and pollen forecasts with type-specific data for the EU/UK. Location search remembers the last five locations and uses location-specific units.

The site is designed as a single scrollable column for mobile, inspired by plaintextsports.com but with its own aesthetic. Character-based visualizations, like the hourly pollen heat map, convey information at a glance. All page state—location, selected day, expanded sections—is stored in the URL, enabling shareable, bookmarkable views.

Technically, brolly.sh uses PocketBase with Go and plain HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Pages are backend-rendered with light JavaScript for interactive navigation. Weather data comes from open-meteo.com, cached for 5 minutes via a custom LRU cache on SQLite to reduce API load.