This is cool! I built https://blizzalert.com a while back which does part of this - sends an SMS with snowfall alerts for mountains that you're watching. I didn't think to match it up with flight costs.
Nice job!
Out of curiosity (if you're willing to share), did you actually find a decent source for ski condition data, or did you end up having to scrape and parse?
Onthesnow / mountain news has good data and APIs, but I don't know how easy it is to get access (you have to go through a contact form), where I was using it, the contract had been setup many years before I joined.
I've built a small Ansible role to generate a certificate and configure it for automatic monthly renewal.
It isn't really set up to handle all possible scenarios, so I only made it available as a gist as opposed to a full role available in the Ansible Galaxy. For example, it expects an Apache virtual host to be configured already instead of allowing Let's Encrypt handle it - I do this in another role specifically set up to handle Apache.
I'm aiming to run every street in my city. I'm almost half way through, and I try to at least make progress on a street every time I'm out. I keep track of my progress here:
http://citystrides.com/users/1/cities/1
There was no way to track this, so I had to make it myself ... I decided along the way to make it so others could sign up as well. If you've got a RunKeeper, MapMyRun, or Strava account you can join in too at http://citystrides.com
I'm building http://citystrides.com ... It lets you track your running, city by city - the main purpose is to track the streets that you run in your city, but beyond that it also does shoe tracking, weather info, step counting (if you have a FitBit), and route sharing.
It started out with me wondering if I could run every street in my city (and not having a way to track that), but I'm growing it out to accommodate runners all over the world.
A huge byproduct of CityStrides is the collection of poly files for cities that I'm gathering at https://github.com/JamesChevalier/cities which can be used to generate OSM files out of larger regions.
This data hasn't been available before now, so it might help create more city-focused projects.
Be aware that those extracts are squares around the cities - they're not exact city border outlines.
This means that you can't just use the data without concern for whether the things you're gathering are actually within the city or not.
Some cities make shapefiles available for urban growth boundaries and city limits. It's worth enquiring. But be aware that some cities city limits are not simple polygons; depending on local ordinances you can see islands, internal voids and peninsulas attached with zero width stems.
Well remember OSM is an international project, so trying to find one definition of "city" and "border of a city" is hard. Some places (like USA) seem to use "city" as a hard solid thing, other places (eg UK / ireland) don't.
Except that the place tag isn't always based on population size. In some places, (e.g. UK), a common cultural definition of a "city" is archaic, and depends if the place has a Cathedral and/or charter from the monarch.
I give you the "city" of St. David's: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/3216768 It's in Wales, UK, and is tagged as "place=city". It's a small town of ~2,000 people. It has a charter from the monarch, and a cathedral. The "note" tag in OSM says: "the "city" is on paper, what's on the ground is a small town".
Greenhorn, Oregon is designated as a city but has a 2010 census population of zero. Though now unicorporated, Tenny, Minnesota, was a city and had a peak population of 180 people in 1910 but now is down to 5 (2010 census).
I've been playing with place names & http://overpass-turbo.eu/ ... I seem to be getting the best results with "city|hamlet|metropolis|town|village", although some states like Alaska & Hawaii still don't return much with this scope.
In Alaska, a lot of places are labeled as County. In Hawaii, a lot of places are labeled as Other.
The site came from the idea that I had to try & run every street in my city. There wasn't any way to track that, so I had to build it myself ... Since I was building it, I figured I might as well make it so that others could use it as well.
I've been adding more features (I think the shoe tracker might be my favorite so far), and I've got more in mind. Right now, it only connects to RunKeeper, but I do want to get other services (and manual gpx uploads) integrated as well.
