Liniment Formulae

Stop whispering and start shouting: Don’t look everyday when the big story heads your way

Hurricane Ike is pointed at Galveston and Houston, and the forecast as I write this says it could be packing sustained winds of more than 100 mph when it makes landfall late Friday night or early Saturday morning. Not a storm to mess around with, and the sort of news that absolutely monopolizes a community’s attention. The perfect time for news sites to stop whispering and start shouting, in other words.

Not to pick on any one newspaper, because we all know none of us are truly putting it all together online, but does this screenshot, grabbed less than 24 hours (more…)

Hurricane season blows up, so does Stormpulse

It’s been amazing sitting next to Matt at the day job and having a front row seat for the massive and sudden popularity of his hurricane tracking site Stormpulse.com. He looked like Squidley Diddley last week, arms flying around, furiously juggling two phones, e-mail, instant messages, text messages and even one whacko lawsuit threat, all hurricane-related. (Does anyone else remember Squidley Diddley, the octopus cartoon character from Hanna-Barbera, or am I making that up?) Then there’s his full-time job at The Post, not to mention two young kids at home. Maybe he’s just conducting an elaborate sleep-deprivation experiment.

Since the embeddable Stormpulse map debuted on PalmBeachPost.com seven weeks ago, it’s spread to dozens of media and weather sites across the country. Then hurricane season heated up to (more…)

Tropical Storm/Hurricane Fay: A real inconvenience

Tropical Storm Fay, likely to become Hurricane Fay, couldn’t be headed toward Florida at a more inconvenient time. Not only are most South Florida schools scheduled to start Monday, but my employer is scheduled to begin a relatively small number of layoffs, too. Relative to the nearly 300 employees who took buyouts and worked their final day last week, anyway. “Less than a dozen” people will be laid off in the newsroom, we’re told. Then there was the fun news, also last week, that our corporate overlords are taking what certainly appears to be but the first step toward an eventual complete exit from the newspaper business. So, yeah, bad timing, Fay, really bad timing.

As always, head to Stormpulse for all your hurricane tracking needs. It’s good enough for The Palm Beach Post and the Orlando Sentinel, among a growing list of others, so it should be good enough for you, too, pal.

What to do when a tropical storm is headed your way: Embed the free Stormpulse tracking map

Tropical Storm Edouard popped up off the coast of Louisiana yesterday, and the current forecast has it pointed directly at Galveston, with a landfall tomorrow morning at just under hurricane strength. (Totally coincidental that The Galveston County Daily News was featured in this week’s edition of Paper View Monday, by the way. My nose for news is simply so good that I’m apparently able to predict newsworthiness weeks in advance.) It’s the perfect time, in other words, to embed the Stormpulse hurricane tracking map on your newspaper, TV station, personal or other site for free. Yes, free.

Update: Post edited, edited and edited some more. What a day.

Stormpulse now appearing at The Palm Beach Post; Coming soon to a site near you?

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 (more…)

Hurricane season is really annoying

How annoyed am I about this forecast track for Tropical Storm Bertha? Very. Very annoyed about this forecast track for Tropical Storm Bertha. Follow it and all the other hurricane season fun at colleague Matt’s Stormpulse.com, the best hurricane tracking site around.

UPDATE: Feeling less annoyed following the Sunday night update.

Where do you turn for top-notch hurricane forecasting?

To me, of course. As I mentioned the other day, the hurricane-tracking site Stormpulse recently introduced user forecasting. Not long after, Hurricane Felix provided the first opportunity to give the system a test drive. I’m happy to report that, using a carefully reasoned meteorological approach I like to call “monkey bashing away at a keyboard,” my Felix forecasting landed me at the top of the rankings. Bafflingly, no one at the National Hurricane Center has called to congratulate me.

DIY hurricane forecasting, no supercomputer or Ph.D required

Hurricane-tracking site Stormpulse just added user profiles and human-consensus forecasting, a potentially cool feature that I could try to explain, but which you would be far better off just reading about over this way. Needless to say, the wisdom of crowds relies on attracting a crowd, so check out Stormpulse now and try your hand at forecasting when the next hurricane rolls around.

Now here’s the part where I casually mention that, as Will recently noted, and as I’ve been meaning to point out for a couple weeks now, Matt Wensing, one of the gigantic brains behind Stormpulse, is now a colleague over at the office. In the interest of still fuller disclosure, I’ll just further note that Stormpulse isn’t affiliated with our employer. So what does Matt do all day, then? I can’t give too much away, but here’s a hint: lolcats. Uh-oh, I’ve already said too much …

How an awesome hurricane-tracking web site is made

Ever wanted to make your own sweet hurricane-tracking web site, like Stormpulse? Ha! Best get started studying up on Python, MySQL, Apache, FreeBSD, etc. in that case. But if you can settle for simply reading how the people actually behind a hurricane-tracking web site did it, check out the latest post on the Stormpulse blog: The Startup Saga, Part I: Weather information is free?

Time to get your storm on

Ah, another summer in paradise: NOAA predicts above normal 2007 Atlantic hurricane season. And don’t miss the always entertaining hurricane season edition of the Census Bureau’s Facts for Features.