alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB)
After reading "During Helene, I Just Wanted a Plain Text Website" on Sparkbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734) , I built safe-now.live – a text-first emergency info site for USA and Canada. No JavaScript, no images, under 10KB. Pulls live FEMA disasters, NWS alerts, weather, and local resources. This is my first live website ever so looking for critical feedback on the website. Please feel free to look around.
Comments
The font size is too small for emergencies on mobile devices. You need to consider that users might be in a panic, may not have both hands free to zoom in, and their vision could be impaired by smoke or other factors.
Such a page has both dynamic and static information in it. If you don't have Internet access, that static info can still be helpful. A QR code can hold 2.9 MB of data. I'm imagining a QR code that contains the static information, and a small script that checks for connection and then redirects to the full page that also has the dynamic info. A QR code on an eink screen that gets remotely updated over LoRA could even include the dynamic info.
Others have mentioned this but looks like fires from close to ~20 years ago are still showing up as "active emergencies"[0]. Shows the Nash Ranch fire as an active emergency but it was declared in 2008.
The UK emergency phone number is 999, not 112.
Ugh. Don't make a website like this without verifying the information is correct please!
It would be good for the specific state/province/city pages to include the same info from the ancestor pages so you only have to link to and load one page for your area.
Seeing how it hasn't survived the HN hug of death... Not sure how you've built it but consider putting it behind a CDN or something and caching the responses, esp since you're trying to pull live data
The about page [0] links to a github repository [1], but it seems to not be uploaded or hidden.
Normally I would say this doesn't matter much, but I wonder if a shorter domain name (or just one without a dash in it) might be in order here. I don't think I would want to be typing or remebering "safe-now.live" in an emergency
I think people would be more interested in the heavy emergencies, not just the ultra light ones
It must be able to cache it's all content in browser.
I guess to do it it properly you need to make it PWA.
Nice touch to have it bilingual in Canada.
Maybe add Spanish?
Local news needs timestamps… I see stale last-week weather news. Had to click and see date from last week in the article.
>Flood: Higher ground - Turn around, don't drown
It's hard to take a 14 year old serious ...
When you drill down to active emergencies for a local area there's a ton of stuff there but it's all old. Why display it if the purpose of the site is current emergency info?
great stuff!!
wish there was sth lk this this side of the pond
Looks nice & useful. However, I'd make two versions: The one you have, and additionally a version with Javascript that is a Progressive Web App (PWA). I'm pretty sure some AI could convert the normal page into a PWA for you.
The PWA has the advantage that it will also load when the internet is down and there is no need to save the page manually.
It appears the site couldn't handle HN traffic or maybe the site owner took it down. Regardless, a project like this needs a lot of thought put into it to be something that people can rely on during times of crisis.
If it can't handle a surge in traffic from HN, it won't be able to handle a surge during natural disasters.