AC-EMWIN Now Serving Cape Coral FD Facebook Page...

In addition to serving the Facebook pages for the Bradford County and Gulf County EMAs, we can now add the Cape Coral Fire Department to the list. All three EMAs are now receiving weather alerts from Alachua County SKYWARN's EMWIN program. So I guess we can officially brag that we're serving the panhandle, north central, and south Florida areas. This is in addition to providing many people in the local area general public with weather alerts to their cellphones, pagers, and personal email accounts...ALL FOR FREE!!!

This from an organization that begs NO money from people - claiming no dues, grants, or funding.

ACEMWIN-HURR-L List Gets A Publicity Boost from NOAA...

It started with 842 hits to the ACEMWIN-HURR-L list web page in one day!!!

On Monday (7/15/2013), we had just 35 or so subscribers. On the very next day, Tuesday, we suddenly had 842 hits to the ACEMWIN-HURR-L page, and a total of 171 subscribers to the list! That's a jump of about 140 new subscribers...IN JUST ONE DAY!

...Un-be-LIEVABLE!!!

[UPDATE: As of 7/25, the web site has seen nearly 2000 hits since the beginning of the month, and membership has reached to OVER 400 subscribers, now. The attention has waned drastically since the first few initially frantic days, down to an average increase now of about 10-15 new subscribers per day, with larger increases seen during periods of tropical activity. Can't complain.]

This, after NOAA listed us on a government web page of "alternate" informational weather bulletin sources across the US. Why? Recently NOAA/NWS sent out a notice (see here) that the free weather bulletin services offered by GovDelivery would soon cease as of July 31st.

It all started on July 10th. What called our attention to all the ballyhoo was quite a number of sudden odd hits from NOAA to the ACEMWIN-HURR-L list. (The ACEMWIN-HURR-L listgroup offers up a number of various types of NHC-issued hurricane bulletins, and offers users the power to customize WHICH hurricane bulletins they want to receive through the list. The list iteslf gets the bulletins from the server owned and run by the Alachua County EMWIN Project, which provides weather alerts to local area users for free as a public service.) That's when they put us on their list (see here). They must have been researching our listgroup, at first - which explains why all the suddenly noticed hits in the IP logs. Right after that they obviously added us to their list. Next thing you know, IP logs began showing HUNDREDS of people looking us up from all over the United States as well as across the globe. Especially attention grabbing were the hits from the US Department of State, and the Dept. of Homeland Security. Gotta make us feel proud. And of course even more hits come from people from all walks of life. We also can't help but notice all the subscriptions from entities from all those various islands in the Atlantic, too. Very interesting.

Makes yuh feel so good to see that. This kind of stuff just keeps happening with us. Other notable moments to make us proud came when Bradford County Emergency Management came to us with a request to send Bradford-related storm bulletins to their Facebook page, which was soon followed by Gulf County EM with the same request. On top of that, we're serving severe weather bulletins to the pagers, cellphones, and emails of many local and surrounding area users. We're also sending same to numerous different email listgroups, Facebook, and Twitter pages.

It makes you feel really proud. You work so hard to put something together so that it can be helpful in service to the public. You put your own money into it; your own blood, and sweat, and sometimes, yes, even tears. You ask for no money or attention or awards in return, and you get...THIS. This is proof that what we're trying to do is truly meaningful...that what we're doing is important. This kind of attention just makes it all worthwhile and it's *better* than receiving some silly piece of paper or a plaque of wood with your name on it.

This is wonderful. You work so hard. You're patient. Then it all WORKS...perfectly. And it helps people.

At the risk of sounding a little like the A-Team's Hannibal here (sigh)...I LOVE it when a plan comes together!

More information about the Alachua County EMWIN Project and all of the things that it now does, and what it can do for you, can be found at http://alachuaskywarn.org/emwin.

AFN Web Pages Down...

Alachua Freenet web page access appears to be down. This means that the Alachua SKYWARN page will not be accessible from there. Instead use the MIRROR site at http://www.fireline.org/skywarn . It is the exact same page, at another site, and it is not affected by the AFN downtime.

Newly-obtained AC-EMWIN IP Address Blocked...

Last week, we discovered that the Alachua County Office of Emergency Management was..."blocking" us. Well, it wasn't quite that simple...

After doing some further research, we discovered that the problem wasn't nearly so simple as one agency blocking us. Apparently, there are multiple varied sources out in Internet-land which keep track of IP addresses which spam. Then people - especially many government agencies - subscribe to these lists in an effort to try to weed out spam. Unfortunately, after a while, the spammers then release the tarnished IP addresses back into the Internet wild. Then the companies who sell them - the Internet Service Providers, or "ISPs" - turn around and RE-sell them again (now that the IPs have had plenty of time to glean plenty of bad reputation) to innocent, unsuspecting people in the general public.

Along comes now the Alachua County EMWIN Project, which just moved it's server to a better location with a generator backup and two Internet lines for the "just in case" situations. Upon moving to this new location, we acquired a "new" IP address. Unbeknownst to us, this pariticular IP address was one which had such a bad reputation that it was listed not just in one but in MULTIPLE spam-tracking databases. These databases apparently have the power to "blacklist" the IP addresses to such an extent that in some cases people were not able to receive our alerts.

When we first began to notice this was going on, it was because we were getting some emails stating that some of our alerts to some people were being blocked because our IP was being blacklisted as a source of spam. The emails weren't very clear though, and made it seem as if it might be the end user who had had us blocked. On further backtracking, it became apparent that the user wasn't responsible at all. The user's ISP was using these blacklists to block emails from so-labelled IP addresses. The County of Alachua uses at *least* one, called Barracuda Central. And when we checked, that's when we found that we were listed in about five.

We sent out a few querying emails to some computer-related listgroups in the hopes that someone might be able to shed more light on how to combat this. A few people helped out with links to places which help you find OUT how many databases have you listed. This began an effort to try to get us "delisted" from all of the blacklists.

(*sigh!*)

Apparently, us end users have to watch out for this. APPARENTLY, places like Cox and AT&T aren't going to TELL you if the IP that they're selling you has a bad reputation; and APPARENTLY, they don't bother to *check*, either. So it's on us. We're assigned the "new" IP address, and we have NO idea that it's been used by someone else in a bad way. And then the nightmare starts.

I've spent the last week trying to communicate with five different blacklist databases to try to get us delisted. I think I've been successful, but it's going to take a while to find out. Apparently, like the search engines, they're all interconnected. One borrows from the other, borrows from the other, and so on. So you have to find out all the contact information, and write all the emails. Then you have to wait 48 to 72 hours for most of the databases to recognize and remove you. And in some cases, it can take even longer.

...Good lord! What a pain in the ass! I think that the ISP sellers should be the ones who "clean up" the reputation FOR you if they're going to sell you an IP address. Meanwhile, I think we've cleaned up the mess, now. What was it that the little lady said in Poltergeist, again? Oh yes... "...THIS house...is CLEAN." (poses for the camera)

Let's hope we never have to go through THAT again. :(

Dust Settled...

Looks like everything is again working. Web pages show normally. Text and graphics products are again flowing to the web sites. Graphics are again displaying on the web pages. Everything looks good. If anyone notes anything amiss with either the AC-SKYWARN or AC-EMWIN web pages, please let us know. Todd

Pardon Our "Dust"...

Our service provider is changing the server software to a newer version and as a result users of the AC-SKYWARN and AC-EMWIN pages may see some funky things for a little while. Please bear with us. May take a little while to work out some kinks which may pop up.

Cooperative Ventures!

We're now providing severe weather bulletins to Bradford County area users.

In the spirit of public service, we're expanding our services to now provide severe weather bulletins to email and cellphone for Bradford County area users. Sponsored by Alachua County SKYWARN, the Alachua County EMWIN Project, and the Bradford County Office of Emergency Management.

What makes our service different is the customizeability that most other services don't offer, such as the ability to either BLOCK/TRASH bulletins during certain time periods, like say, overnight; or to HOLD bulletins after hours and still send them in the morning anyway if users wish, maybe because they still want to know what happened overnight.

We've already been providing these bulletins to BCEM's Facebook and Twitter pages, too, for quite a while, now.