Show HN: Safe-now.live – Ultra-light emergency info site (<10KB)

159 points - today at 9:06 AM


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.

https://safe-now.live

Source

Comments

hypeatei today at 4:14 PM
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.

randomtoast today at 1:58 PM
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.
_fat_santa today at 3:01 PM
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.

[0]: https://safe-now.live/c/us/co/colorado-springs/

iberator today at 8:57 PM
Great but icons fail to render on Mosaic, Netscape and other web 1.0 browsers. Apart from that: great
dprice1 today at 8:21 PM
I like this! I noticed that the weather for some Bay Area counties seem to be getting zeroed out for temperature.

https://safe-now.live/c/us/ca/county/san-mateo/ https://safe-now.live/c/us/ca/county/santa-cruz/

(both say: Weather Now 32°F / 0°C - Sunny )

doodad3 today at 12:47 PM
The about page [0] links to a github repository [1], but it seems to not be uploaded or hidden.

[0]: https://safe-now.live/about

[1]: https://github.com/venkatag/SafeNow

kmfrk today at 7:39 PM
From an accessibility perspective, the HTML emoji might be an issue for screen readers.

You can still keep them as `h2#foo::before{content: "emoji ";}` CSS pseudo-elements instead, if memory serves.

(Used "emoji" as a placeholder to ensure it renders in the example.)

Great project; (way) more websites should look like this.

doterobcn today at 10:04 AM
I would suggest increasing font-size, looks too small
1970-01-01 today at 2:46 PM
I'm seeing fires from 1999.

https://safe-now.live/c/us/al/

ohashi today at 5:22 PM
I've been working on a similar idea for travelers, https://travelsafetydata.com/

It's pulling the travel advisories from US/CA/UK/IE/AU/NZ and aggregating the results/information to help you understand the risks of different countries. It also pulls from other sources for basic country info/risks (eg. women, lgbtq).

Yours is way lighter weight and focused, very cool!

browningstreet today at 5:17 PM
I love this kind of thing - I'm always building lists and reference things, but IME people generally don't gravitate towards things like this.

That said, I really want a backcountry version of this. I live in Tahoe and our relationship to incoming storms (lightning) is pretty different than those in the Rockies. Plus bears and other predators (how to behave). Etc.

I once wanted to do something similar w/r/t tap water and drinkability.

Fun/neat.

happyopossum today at 4:44 PM
This is an interesting idea, but the very first page I looked at was wrong (current weather in Alameda county shows as 72* - it's almost 30* below that here, and the daily high in the warmest areas is projected to be 65).

Next I looked at San Francisco, and oddly it listed a bunch of minor earthquakes in San Ramon - none of which are listed in Alameda county, which is actually next to (and parts of which actually felt) those tremors.

nicoburns today at 2:46 PM
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
goda90 today at 4:15 PM
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.
shoelessone today at 4:25 PM
I appreciate the idea, but as others have mentioned it seems like for something like this to be useful it really needs to be well thought out and tolerant to extreme spikes in traffic.

I might be wrong here but it looked like the responses from the server are chunked, which I _think_ precludes the use of a highly optimized cache response e.g. from a CDN. Assuming that's true (very open to correction of course!) I wonder why this would be.

mghackerlady today at 5:25 PM
This is really useful! I'm planning on making a list of websites that work well with Lynx and other text based browser, specifically because people should be able to access important information regardless of how powerful their computer is
qingcharles today at 5:44 PM
Probably won't break anything but you're missing <head></head> and your <footer> is outside your </body> :)
imwillofficial today at 9:04 PM
This is an excellent idea, ill pass it along to friends in emergency management
goda90 today at 4:09 PM
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.
davedx today at 4:06 PM
The UK emergency phone number is 999, not 112.

Ugh. Don't make a website like this without verifying the information is correct please!

rumatoest today at 12:16 PM
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.

cush today at 2:52 PM
I think people would be more interested in the heavy emergencies, not just the ultra light ones
whynotmaybe today at 2:35 PM
Nice touch to have it bilingual in Canada.

Maybe add Spanish?

yearolinuxdsktp today at 2:53 PM
Local news needs timestamps… I see stale last-week weather news. Had to click and see date from last week in the article.
idiotsecant today at 1:12 PM
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?
hobo_in_library today at 4:21 PM
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
mattlondon today at 5:04 PM
You need an AI angle if you want investment and up-boats.

Suggest a LLM-based chat that consumes feeds and provides a terrification-score rating letting you know how to calibrate your panic-levels, based on real data. Allow for real-time questions on how to purify water, if it's better to carry gold or ammo etc

Good luck. I'll give you 80 mil based on a 40% stake with voting rights.

lencastre today at 11:50 AM
great stuff!!

wish there was sth lk this this side of the pond

moralestapia today at 3:28 PM
>Flood: Higher ground - Turn around, don't drown

It's hard to take a 14 year old serious ...

freak42 today at 2:18 PM
... for North America.
jonathanstrange today at 9:35 AM
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.