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.
