I got access to the Wire Service a while back, and I finally put in the time to make use of it.
I present for your consideration and feedback:
https://tornado.live/In order to get closer to real-time delivery of weather alerts to your browser, it uses web sockets instead of polling on a timer. So instead of needing to wait 30 seconds or so fot the next refresh of the map, web sockets allow the Ingest Service, which receives and parses the products headers and polygon, to send the alert the moment it gets it. The site keeps a connection to the server, because that's the whole point of it - to be live, to reduce as much delay as possible.
Current Functionality:- Get Current Active & New Products as issued
- View Alerts with a Polygon on the Map
Currently Broken:- Watch Polygons - In order to load all products when you first load, a "summary" request is sent. All active products, and their polygons, are returned. County/Zone polygons have an obscene amount of points, and I had to remove them from the summary request because it would take too long to build the message. Working on a workaround.
Planned Functionality:- Better Mobile Support
- Point, County, Zone, and Web Location Based Filtering
- Audio Alerts (based on filters)
- Web Push Notifications (primarily for watch notifications, Cellular Alerts/WEA or your weather radio should still be relied on for unexpected warnings)
- Webhooks*
* aha! an asterisk! - yes. The reason I made this in the first place. I wanted my own home automations to have more real-time alerts. Like playing the alert over the all the speakers in the house, turning on all the lights when a warning is issued (but fading on at night, so you're not blinded by the light), suspending any low priority containers on the home server and stopping any file operations so that nothing is lost if the power goes out. Yes, weird things like that. But I didn't want to write something that could only be used in one place, given how useful a live feed is. So I made this.
I have no plans to monetize the map in any way. I don't want banner ads, video ads, text ads... (it's disgusting how many ads a certain... channel has on their map). I want it to be useful and informative to those who need it. But in order to build webhooks, I needed to build out most of this functionality anyways, and the map looks nice. But the functionality I'd plan to monetize would be webhooks. Not looking to get rich off of this, but to fill a gap for weather enthusiasts to get something like this at a more reasonable price and pay the server bill.
So I pose another question to anyone reading this: if you know what webhooks are and would be interested in a service that sent you webhook notifications for weather alerts affecting your tracked locations, what would you be willing to pay for it? Would you pay per webhook? Per event (with a valid ETN)? Per month?
