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 before Ike’s expected landfall, strike you as shouting?

Or this one, from about the same time?

The immediate message I get from those pages: Just another day at your link-laden local newspaper website.

An event such as a hurricane (a “local armageddon,” as Will Sullivan called it) is the time to try some of the simplification Mark Potts described here. There’s only one story about which everyone is talking, so why overload your page with 30 links about the same event, not to mention the other 50 links that are usually there? Why not just one big picture or, better yet in the case of a hurricane, interactive map? Throw in a gigantic headline, and you’re accurately reflecting both the gravity of the event and its natural grip on your readers’ attention.

Easy to use trumps everything, after all, and lots of words, sentences and paragraphs are the very last thing people are looking for when a hurricane is headed their way, no matter how cleverly they’re written. I’ve done the oh-no-it’s-coming-right-at-us dance six times since 2004 and, believe me, stories are of very little use. Just give me a big map.

Even if you don’t go that far, at least have a special armageddon design ready to drop onto your site:

Here’s some musical inspiration to get you going:

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 2004 and 2005 levels in the past two weeks, and everything just sort of blew up. New features, exponential traffic growth, and  they even made TechCrunch on Friday. Congratulations to Matt and his partner Brad for the recent, stunning and well-deserved success of Stormpulse. It’s a powerful lesson, one from which newspapers could learn, in the power of identifying and solving, meticulously and obsessively, a real world problem or need.

In case you missed it amid last week’s hurricane excitement, Stormpulse now has a product page on Facebook, so go there and become a fan. They also added Tipjoy, a virtual tip jar, to the site, which allows you to easily leave micropayments (or big, fat macropayments if you’re feeling generous) as gratitude for the awesome resource they’ve built. I like to leave 10 cents for every forecast that doesn’t show a killer storm smashing into my house. Looks like the Tipjoy thing is gone now that everyone asking how they could support the site had the chance to pledge some change. Now I just hope they remember to actually make the payments on those pledges.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 …