I updated my climate tracking website, Today's Record High, this week to get better SEO results for users search for what is today's record high. The website was originally written in React and would make calls out to the RCC ACIS REST API to get all the data. For some reason I was never able to get Google to index the site properly so I decided to rewrite the site in .Net Core MVC. I'm not sure if it's something I was doing wrong or just the fact that the SEO for the SPA wasn't as good as it needed to be. The majority of the referrals were coming from Bing of all places.
Here's a recap of the last 30 days of traffic to the website. I don't do any advertising and the only posts are coming from this website. Given the SEO updates I've made I anticipate that the Google numbers should go up, we'll see!
Rewriting the site in a classic client/server architecture is going to give me flexibility and allow me to render the website at the server which should help my SEO rankings with Google. Among the architecture updates I made some changes to the UI and added a couple more graphs and charts.
Here are some screen shots of the latest updates made to Today's Record High.
Roadmap
Now that I have the site launched and rendering in .Net I plan to add more features. The goal is to add a new feature twice a month. So, once every couple of weeks seems like a fair goal to have. On top of client work and general family stuff, there's only a little room left for me to develop these side projects. I'm still trying to launch my Azure B2C User Admin site as well.
Here are some items that are on the upcoming roadmap:
- Create an extremes page that will show the most snowfall ever recorded, most rainfall, the hottest and coldest days ever recorded for a location
- Highest max temperature, coldest low temperature, for all years
- Total snowfall per year, total rainfall per year
- Monthly climate normals