Great news for those of us here in hurricane country: Stormpulse, the tropical weather tracking site built by colleague Matt Wensing and his programming partner in Chicago, is now providing its awesome hurricane mapping technology to the storm section of The Palm Beach Post. And just in time, too, because the tropics are really heating up. Hurricane Bertha is headed to Iceland, for Pete’s sake!

Matt started Stormpulse before joining the Backyard Post team at The Palm Beach Post, so it’s cool to see the two finally come together. And though I have absolutely nothing to do with Stormpulse, seeing its mapping software embedded on The Post is personally gratifying because of the crazy, fortuitous way that I met Matt.

I was still talking ears off and hustlin’ Backyard Post around the office on April 26, 2007 when I had my first conversation with The Post’s online director about hiring a professional web developer. Literally seconds after I got back to my desk following that meeting I ran across this post about Stormpulse on the predecessor to Jason Spalding’s current site, Find GIS. That pointed me to this article at GISuser.com, and finally on to the site itself. It blew me away, so I started digging around to find out more about the people who made it. I noticed one of the guys lived in West Palm Beach, left a comment on the blog asking him to get in touch and casually mentioned later that I had just been in a meeting about hiring a programmer. Two months passed, Matt told me he was job-hunting, I went completely mental and flipped out on just about everyone in the building because he had other offers almost instantaneously, and either because of or in spite of my crazed urgency, we ended up hiring the guy. A few months later we also hired Matt’s high school classmate Peter Sheats, and here we are.

And about that “Coming soon to a site near you?” bit from the headline. The even cooler Stormpulse news is that anyone interested in embedding their tracking map on your own site can now do so. Check out the Stormpulse blog for details.