News about the Personal Severe Weather Notification website
Earlier today, I discovered that I needed to perform emergency maintenance on the WxNotify database, which unfortunately brought the entire service down for about 20 minutes. The service went down around 4:11pm CDT and came back up at 4:30pm CDT.
Many apologies for any inconvenience. I have made some adjustments to prevent the culprit issue from happening in the future.
Happy Sunday! I wanted to let everyone know that I just pushed a large set of changes that overhaul how the WxNotify alert system works. Users can now create alerts that utilize more than one contact and/or more than one location! Since WxNotify users are limited to a max of 10 alerts, these changes will help reduce the number of alerts needed to achieve the user’s desired alerting behavior.
For Pushover users, this release also includes an update that abbreviates the alert sent by WxNotify, removing much of the unhelpful text in the product. Pushover limits messages to 1024 characters, and often NWS products are larger than that, so useful information has been getting cut off. A link to the full product will still be included in Pushover notifications. In addition, this release adds some copy changes, added a couple FAQ page items, and fixed a few little bugs here and there.
I have spent several weeks testing this new alerts feature, but it’s always possible I could have missed some bugs. As always, please let me know if you encounter any issues.
Thank you!
I just added the products below to the list of available options when creating product lists. I also renamed the product categories to (hopefully) make a little more sense. Please let me know if there are NWS products that aren’t being sent by WxNotify that you would like me to add!
Disclaimer: Some products are only issued by specific Weather Forecast Offices (i.e. WFOs). This is dictated by what hazards or phenomena are likely to happen in that WFO’s area of responsibility. For example, you should never expect to ever see Marine-related products issued by
the St. Louis, MO (LSX) WFO, since those products only affect areas near oceans & Great Lakes regions.
WxNotify has a new page that includes several Place FIles for Storm Predicion Center (SPC) products that can be used with the popular commercial (i.e. paid) radar programs GRLevel 2 and GRLevel 3. There is also an open-source/free radar program called Supercell-WX that can also use Place Files. What’s a Place File, you ask? Place files are text files containing drawing statements which can be imported and used in aforementioned radar programs. Place files allow you to overlay lines, polygons, and objects on top of the radar display. For example, the SPC Tornado and Severe Thunderstorms Place FIle overlay all current watch boxes in the radar app. A Place File that includes your custom locations is also available.
To access the Place Files page, log into WxNotify and click the user menu in the upper right hand corner and then click “Place Files”. I hope WxNotify subscribers find this useful!
I discovered this morning that there were no alerts (other than daily forecasts) sent between around 9pm CDT 5/21 to this morning (5/22) around 9:30am CDT. Also, discovered that a number of subscribers erroneously received a notification that they have disabled alerts. I have since found the issue and fixed it. Apologies for the inconvenience!
I discovered after the upgrade that two-factor authentication does not seem to be working correctly. I am investigating the issue and will post an update here once the issue is resolved.
Thanks for you patience and understanding!
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EDIT as of 10:45 AM CDT 5/12/24 – Two factor is now working as expected.
After many months of planning, upgrading software, fixing bugs, and implementing brand new infrastructure, I’m happy to announce that WxNotify has received some well-needed upgrades! The website and admin portal still look the same, (for now) but much of the background code and processes have been updated. These changes allow me to better monitor all the services WxNotify depends on, add some additional redundancy, and save me money on hosting costs.
On a technical note, I have switched to running WxNotify services using Docker, which has simplified my development process and hosting set up quite a bit. Now that I’m using Docker, upgrades in the future should be easier as I can test my entire tech stack locally, and then deploy identical infrastructure to my Cloud servers. I had to spend quite a bit of time getting my new deployment process hashed out since much of it changed from before when I was running software natively on the servers.
As with any upgrade, there may have been some bugs that I missed, so please be patient as I work through fixing them. I have already performed a significant amount of testing prior to this “go-live”, however there always seems to be things that slip through the cracks. If you encounter issues with things not looking or functioning correctly, or you miss getting alerts when you think you should have, please let me know!
Now that I’ve finally gone live with these upgrades, I will continue to work through a backlog of additional features that I plan to roll out in the next several weeks & months. If you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see, also please let me know!
Thanks and I hope you continue to enjoy the service!
I’m excited to announce that a new beta feature has just been integrated into WxNotify! The open source software Traccar is now being used to help provide real-time location information to WxNotify. With the use of a free iOS or Android client, WxNotify users can now be notified for weather alerts affecting their specific location, no matter where they go!
Up until now, all Locations in WxNotify were static, based on a specific latitude/longitude pair. If users wanted to be notified for products affecting more than one place, they could create several different locations, and then create multiple alerts using those locations. With Traccar, they can now use the location created by Traccar, and WxNotify will automatically “follow them”, sending them alerts for their specific location! This will be especially helpful to those WxNotify users who are traveling, or are on vacation somewhere outside of their normal location(s).
For more information about how to enable Traccar on your account, please see the Location section of the WxNotify Knowledge Base.
Haven’t posted in a while, since my time has been taken up by a recent move to a different state and my current job.
From a site perspective though, I just deployed fixes for a few issues, including a pretty significant one that prevented new account sign ups. Also was recently notified that Verizon’s free Email to SMS Gateway no longer works for non business customers. To avoid getting a bunch of bounces, I had to disable all alerts where users were using Verizon SMS contacts. Because of this, I STRONGLY recommend replacing these SMS contacts with something more dependable and time-sensitive like Pushover, Twilio, Slack, Telegram, or Discord to continue getting potentially life-threatening alerts.
Now that things have settled down, I will be devoting more time to adding features and bug fixing. Stay tuned!
I have been out of town since last Saturday (7/16) and just happened to notice this morning that no alerts were being sent out from WxNotify! The issue ended up being a mismatch of versions between a Javascript library (socket.io) between Laravel Echo Server, and client. This mismatch began last week when I did some deployments to roll out some new features. (more on that soon)
At any rate, the alerting issue has now been resolved and alerts are once again going out. Many apologies!!