First of all, slau, I'm sorry about what you had to go through. I know exactly what it's like, because my family lived it last Thursday. Aldea del Fresno, in Madrid, sits right next to the village where the biggest fire in local history started, and they were evacuated. The day before yesterday, in the afternoon, they were finally all able to go back home.

I'll answer and explain the thing you rightly pointed out about the social image, but first let me thank pjmlp. Not for defending me, but because he said exactly what I would have said in his place.

I'm curious why you stopped at the OG image, slau. If you had gone a bit further into the site, you would have seen that I started this website on Thursday night, right after what we began living through. I sat down and looked at the Spanish websites showing this information, and I can tell you my impression at that moment was that these were interfaces nobody had thought about for even two seconds. And I won't even get into most of them: ads everywhere, trying to monetize something serious.

I'm a senior frontend developer. Building an interface like this is my bread and butter. What I wanted was for people to see exactly what was happening, on any device, within the first second of landing on the page.

I pull the hotspot data from the FIRMS API, from all the satellites. And I paid attention to what NASA does there, which is removing the duplicate hotspots you get from several satellites. As far as I could tell, none of the other Spanish sites were handling that. Kind of obvious, right?

If you look closely, I show burned areas. That's a different API (EFFIS) and I can assure you getting that to work properly is a challenge. I didn't find a trace of burned areas on any of the websites that were out there.

And the best one of all: the weather data, the wind! It hadn't occurred to anyone that this data, when you're talking about wildfires, is key. It's fundamental. It's basic to know it, the way I see it.

What I'm getting at, slau, is that I'm doing this, and on top of that, since yesterday I've had to upgrade my Cloudflare free plan (Workers) because it was going to hit the limit around midday. So I pay the $5 a month, more than happy to, so it stays free for people and with no ads. And I'm glad it's a living, useful project.

Now, on your criticism of the social image. Look, do you know what the worst part of that image is? Well, let me say first that I have to use every free resource available to me, as best I can. So, ChatGPT for images. And I'll tell you that image is the third attempt. My replies to what ChatGPT kept giving me went like: "please, this looks super apocalyptic, because all you think about is fire when I'm telling you I have features like the wind one, which nobody else has...". So ChatGPT needs to take a good hard look at itself, a really good one. And I can assure you that image's days are numbered. If I haven't changed it already it's because I've done 3 in two days, and ChatGPT tells me "come on, if you don't pay, come back in 24 hours...".

Then there's Google indexing images, and Facebook, where if I change the OG image I have to make a new version of the file, it's not a straight replacement.

What I mean is that I can't do this in two seconds. And the website is a newborn, it's 6 days old.

I hope this makes you see that the same thing happened to me as happened to you. And me being a frontend dev, I told myself: well, if I can do something to contribute, I'm going to do it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093528

Points: 16

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