Drop the open-by-default on the first three countries (every <details> starts
collapsed) and order the country sections alphabetically instead of by largest
city's population.
- Climate hub (/climate) now uses native <details> per country — collapsible
expand/shrink sections with a city count and a rotating marker (top 3 countries
open by default). Links stay in the DOM, so crawling/SEO is unaffected.
- Fix nested F/C parentheses in the city lede (e.g. 'July (71°F (22°C) average
high)') by rephrasing so the already-parenthesized temperature isn't wrapped in
another paren.
- Fix the 5-column records table overlapping on mobile: give it a min-width so it
scrolls inside .table-wrap on narrow screens instead of colliding.
Auto-sourcing a notable weather event from Wikipedia search proved unreliable
(wrong matches, low coverage), so city_events.py is a small, fact-checked list of
one iconic event per city (Katrina/New Orleans, Harvey/Houston, the 1952 Great
Smog/London, the 2021 heat dome/Seattle, ...) — 31 cities, each with a Wikipedia
link. The city page shows a 'Notable weather in {city}' callout when one exists and
otherwise just the flavor blurb. Tests check the curated slugs are all valid and the
callout renders (and is absent for uncurated cities).
Add unique editorial content so the programmatic pages don't read as templated:
- gen_flavor.py seeds backend/cities_flavor.json with a short descriptive blurb per
city from Wikipedia's free REST summary API (no key), validating each match by
comparing article coordinates to the city's lat/lon so the wrong 'Springfield'
never attaches. Retries + modest concurrency; ~700/750 cities get a blurb, the
rest render without one. Text is CC BY-SA, attributed with a 'via Wikipedia' link.
- City pages show the blurb under the intro and a travel callout that deep-links to
the compare page with the city pre-loaded (/compare#loc=lat,lon) — the visitor
just adds their own city. Month pages get the same seasonal 'visiting in {month}?'
compare link. Both add unique per-page text and internal links.
- cities.py gains flavor(slug); tests cover the blurb + attribution + compare CTA.
* SEO: generate curated city set for crawlable climate pages
gen_cities.py reuses the GeoNames index places.py already parses to select the top
~500 metros by population, assigns each a stable URL-safe slug (dropping admin1 when
it repeats the city name), and writes committed backend/cities.json. cities.py loads
it lazily with slug lookup, all_slugs(), display_name(), and by_country() grouping
for the upcoming hub + sitemap.
* SEO: rendering core, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and metadata hygiene
- content.py: Jinja2 environment + HTML responder (ETag/304), dynamic /robots.txt
(disallows /api and /alerts, points at the sitemap) and /sitemap.xml (enumerates
the home/static pages plus every city, month, and records URL from cities.py).
Registered on the app before the StaticFiles mount so the routes win.
- templates/base.html.j2: shared layout with unique title/description, self-
referential canonical, Open Graph, favicon/manifest, header nav (adds a Climate
link) and a footer link graph.
- Give each existing page a unique <meta description> (were 5x identical) and a
self-referential <link rel=canonical>; add WebApplication JSON-LD to the home page.
- Pin jinja2.
* SEO: server-rendered per-city climate page (/climate/{slug})
The keystone crawlable page: for a city it snaps to the grid cell, loads the
archive (fetching once if missing, self-healing), and renders as real HTML — a
'how today compares' block (grade + percentile per metric from grade_day, tinted
by tier), a monthly normals table (climatology at each month's 15th, shown in °F
and °C), all-time records (new grading.all_time_records helper), a breadcrumb,
Dataset+Place+BreadcrumbList JSON-LD, self-referential canonical, and links into
the interactive tool + month/records pages. Content-page CSS added to style.css
(renamed the table class to avoid colliding with the app's .normals flex row).
* SEO: month (/climate/{slug}/{month}) and records (/climate/{slug}/records) pages
Month pages render the exact-month long-tail ('average weather in {city} in
{month}') with that month's average high/low, typical p10-p90 range, month-specific
records, and prev/next month links. Records pages show all-time record highs/lows
per metric with dates (grading.all_time_records). Shared _resolve_city helper; the
literal /records route is registered before the {month} param and month names are
validated (unknown month -> 404).
* SEO: climate hub, weather glossary, and about/methodology pages
- /climate: crawlable directory of all ~500 cities grouped by country — the
internal-link graph that lets search engines discover every city page.
- /glossary + /glossary/{term}: plain-language definitions (climate normal,
percentile, temperature anomaly, feels-like, heat index, wind chill, humidity,
reanalysis) with DefinedTerm JSON-LD and cross-links into the tool.
- /about: methodology page (ERA5 data source, 45-year baseline, +/-7-day window,
percentile grading) for E-E-A-T. All linked from the shared footer.
* SEO: archive warmer, content-page tests, and deploy docs
- warm_cities.py: paced, idempotent offline warmer that pre-fetches each city
cell's archive so /climate pages serve from cache and a crawl can't burst the
archive quota (pages self-heal if hit before warming).
- tests/test_content.py: city-set slug uniqueness/lookup, robots.txt, sitemap
enumerating city/month/records URLs, and that a rendered city page carries the
stats + canonical + Dataset JSON-LD in the HTML; plus month/records/hub/glossary/
about routing and 404s.
- DEPLOY.md: document the content pages, the warm step, and submitting the sitemap.