Yeah, those were good times indeed. I try not to think too much about just how many hours/days/weeks/months I spent writing creatively cached Flash graph drawing to get the silky smooth pan & zoom behavior the dashboard offered.
But while lord Google is amazing at indexing SEOd text content, they aren't (weren't?) very good at feeding traffic to a tool with effectively no text. How could they know it was a good way to view the forecast for San Francisco without having a dedicated weathespark.com/forecast/san_francisco page with a decent amount of text along the lines of "forecast", "ten day forecast", "temperature", "precipitation", "rain", etc?
We did try to do something like that but Google never picked it up - while many people loved the dashboard, as a fraction of overall forecast consumers it was probably quite tiny, so I can't say I blame them ;)
Searching for any recipe shows the same paperclip-maximizing-gone-amok do-not-want SEO trap: I don't care about some made-up story about how this ratatouille makes you think of summers at grandma's garden. That's all empty word-calories best left for the writers at pixar. Something truly revolutionary would be if google ranked recipe sites by higher recipe-to-fluff ratios.
Thanks for developing all the stuff at weatherspark. It's one of my favorite practical examples of compact visualization done right.
Thank you so much for that, I miss it terribly but understand that it wasn't worth the effort. It was beautiful while it lasted. (and this map is super cool too)
But while lord Google is amazing at indexing SEOd text content, they aren't (weren't?) very good at feeding traffic to a tool with effectively no text. How could they know it was a good way to view the forecast for San Francisco without having a dedicated weathespark.com/forecast/san_francisco page with a decent amount of text along the lines of "forecast", "ten day forecast", "temperature", "precipitation", "rain", etc?
We did try to do something like that but Google never picked it up - while many people loved the dashboard, as a fraction of overall forecast consumers it was probably quite tiny, so I can't say I blame them ;)