Weathrman is no more...

Weathrman was built around a simple idea; search Flickr for a photograph taken near you, showing weather conditions and time of day roughly similar to your current location's weather conditions and time of day.

For the most part, it worked surprisingly well, given that I had limited API capabilities from Flickr, time-of-day is badly managed in images, most of Flickr's images weren't geocoded well, the API is horribly slow, and althoiugh we start searching hyperlocal and step upwards until we find something, each of those queries is run sequentially (due to both limited number of queries per day to Flickr and the cost of AppEngine to me).

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It's been many years since I seriously looked at the codebase; the app still worked, but the quality of the images it pulled had steadily decreased, people aren't really using Flickr like they used to.

The net effect is that the app was old (written for Froyo, and last updated in 2011), had bad image choices due to limited API control... and for a while, was actually costing me money to run, as it had enough users to hit AppEngine's limit on free CPU time.

But no longer; it's fallen out of use, gets few requests. The app has bitrotted, people have moved on from being endlessly fascinated with live wallpapers, and there's no point leaving it up.

So down it comes, three years after my last update.

If it brought you joy, thank you; if it brought you tears, I apologize.