Bespoke Websites for Emergencies are an Active Thing · Lance Orner<br>Yesterday near Reno, NV, we had the “Bug” Fire expand rapidly due to heat and<br>wind, and evacuation orders were issued by the County for several nearby<br>neighborhoods. Facebook, Reddit, and Social Media were aflutter with pictures<br>of the fire, questions about the evacuations, and people looking for info. Dad<br>was affected, so he and the dog are now staying with us for a couple days. All<br>is good for now.<br>I’m at my desk all day, and there’s nothing I can do about the fire, but I can<br>register a domain name, and throw a website together with Claude’s help. Boom,<br>https://bugfireinfo.com is born. I posted about it yesterday<br>when it went up.<br>Bespoke websites for emergencies are now a thing that I’ve seen pop up more and<br>more. I created similar sites of links for the Paradise Camp Fire in 2018 and<br>the Almanor Dixie Fire in 2021. A clearly non-official site with all of the<br>links from all of the official sites, including Fire, Sheriff, County, Red<br>Cross, and anybody else that might be relevant.<br>I also created a single-issue website about a washed out<br>road I care about. This is easier to post in<br>Social Media when you’re trying to get attention. A single site with all of<br>the information.<br>A single website URL is much easier to give to friends and family, who don’t really<br>know how to look up the data on their own, but it’s something that can be put in a text message. “Go to this site,” is all<br>you need to say. They’re happy.<br>Website traffic in the past 24 hrs confirms this. At peak, I was getting 14<br>unique/min, now down to about 90 visitors an hour, both of which are easily handled<br>by a couple of static pages on a cheap compute server somewhere. First<br>references came from Facebook and Reddit, but as time goes on, more is coming<br>by direct search. Discord, WhatsApp, and Slack have all fetched link previews,<br>which means the URL is getting pasted into private chats even though those<br>clicks then show up as “direct”. I’m getting real referrals from Teams and even<br>Bluesky. The Teams means it’s probably being shared in work chats. My little<br>URL is being copied around and given to people who want quick information. This<br>is the entire intent of this project.<br>Best of all, 53% of the visitors are in Nevada, and Reno and Sparks are the top<br>two cities by a wide margin. It reached the people it was for.<br>Search referrals are also interesting, in last three hours, Bing 76, Yahoo 43,<br>DuckDuckGo 28, and Google 18. Despite the size of Google, they’re last, only<br>because I assume some random website is being deprioritized to official<br>sources, which is probably the correct thing to do.<br>I’ve got Claude doing a web search for me every hour, summarizing new news, and<br>proposing changes to the site. I’m not really trying to drive any traffic,<br>I’ve got no advertising, and I don’t want to compete with real news sites. I<br>just want a list of links I can give to people.<br>There seems to be a real need for these custom emergency sites. That’s probably a<br>good thing. We tech people will provide. I don’t know where this leads from here.<br>Email me if you’d like, but I’m also going to post<br>this to Hacker News, and I’d love to see some discussion of a new trend like<br>this. Maybe it’s not a new<br>trend, but with AI tools like Claude, it’s definitely much easier to create.