yelyah

yelyah - “last earthquake 20111005” piano improv

Man I love my power company. They managed to keep the power on non-stop for a whole month.

A WHOLE MONTH?!?!?

Until today.

God I hate my power company.

But I have this compulsive need to find the positive in a bad situation so I used my downtime to brainstorm on the only thing that didn’t require an internet connection: Last Earthquake.

I decided (hoping that the power would eventually come back) that I was going to launch some version of the site today. I did.

Oh, it’s lovely. There is literally one earthquake listed (hey, “earthquake” is singular after all).

Oh and the updates (as opposed to the site itself) are currently powered by my laptop… a laptop that isn’t on 24/7. Ya know, so the “last” earthquake may actually be several hours old at the time you see the last earthquake site.

Of course I’m going to fix all of that. What I have here is an exercise in DON’T PROCRASTINATE. I’ve been sitting on the idea for like a month now and finally I have some solid movement forward. That’s way more valuable than it just being the idea that’s stuck in my head. And of course the embarrassment of the site actually being live but the data being not quite so, is way more of a motivation to figure out how I’m going to force manual updates than if the idea were still in the ether.

If you’re interested in the tech stats, here ya go:

• Ruby powers the scraper that parses the USGS earthquake data
• Middleman (also Ruby) powers the site itself
• the site is static and hosted on Amazon S3 for literally pennies a month

My stumbling block is that I have to figure out where I’m going to host the s3 sync utility since I haven’t done anything similar yet.

My new obsession seems to be building these hybrid static/dynamic sites. If I were building wickedwx from scratch, I’d probably go this route. After all, wickedwx is basically static content… it just gets regenerated every few minutes (and in downtime like this though (where my tornadoes at?)… it’s more like every couple hours).

And of course, the big thing is that with any of these static sites, I’m theoretically covered if I ever get bitten by the viral bug and suddenly see a huge surge of traffic (a girl can dream, right?).

In a big way this project represents how I would’ve started wickedwx had I known then what I know now. See, wickedwx hung out in obscurity for quite some time (and by other people’s standards, it continues to). Search engine traffic has represented a tiny fraction of my overall traffic.

See, I’ve got earthquake radar sitting around still waiting to be polished up (the procrastination bit there is that it shares its codebase with the storm time machine and I have yet to separate the two in a maintainable way). But instead of launching it into obscurity, I’m going to attempt to get its sister project going (last earthquake) where I’ll be attempting to actually rank for some “organic” earthquake traffic in search engines. Then I’ll have a built-in audience of people who might actually be interested in earthquake radar when it launches.

We’ll see. Maybe I’ll fall flat on my face like I so often do, but hey, I can’t move on to the next failure until I fail on this one.

THAT’S THE SPIRIT.