{"slug": "bespoke-websites-for-emergencies-are-an-active-thing", "title": "Bespoke Websites for Emergencies Are an Active Thing", "summary": "Lance Orner, a tech blogger, created bespoke emergency information websites, including bugfireinfo.com for the Bug Fire near Reno, NV, which drew 53% of its visitors from Nevada and peaked at 14 unique visitors per minute. Orner used Claude, an AI tool, to build the site and automate hourly news summaries, highlighting a growing trend of custom emergency sites that aggregate official links for easy sharing.", "body_md": "# Bespoke Websites for Emergencies are an Active Thing\n\nYesterday near Reno, NV, we had the “Bug” Fire expand rapidly due to heat and wind, and evacuation orders were issued by the County for several nearby neighborhoods. Facebook, Reddit, and Social Media were aflutter with pictures of the fire, questions about the evacuations, and people looking for info. Dad was affected, so he and the dog are now staying with us for a couple days. All is good for now.\n\nI’m at my desk all day, and there’s nothing I can do about the fire, but I can\nregister a domain name, and throw a website together with Claude’s help. Boom,\n[https://bugfireinfo.com](https://bugfireinfo.com) is born. I [posted about it yesterday](/posts/bug-fire-information/)\nwhen it went up.\n\nBespoke websites for emergencies are now a thing that I’ve seen pop up more and more. I created similar sites of links for the Paradise Camp Fire in 2018 and the Almanor Dixie Fire in 2021. A clearly non-official site with all of the links from all of the official sites, including Fire, Sheriff, County, Red Cross, and anybody else that might be relevant.\n\nI also created [a single-issue website about a washed out\nroad](https://skywayevacroute.com) I care about. This is easier to post in\nSocial Media when you’re trying to get attention. A single site with all of\nthe information.\n\nA single website URL is much easier to give to friends and family, who don’t really 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 you need to say. They’re happy.\n\nWebsite traffic in the past 24 hrs confirms this. At peak, I was getting 14 unique/min, now down to about 90 visitors an hour, both of which are easily handled by a couple of static pages on a cheap compute server somewhere. First references came from Facebook and Reddit, but as time goes on, more is coming by direct search. Discord, WhatsApp, and Slack have all fetched link previews, which means the URL is getting pasted into private chats even though those clicks then show up as “direct”. I’m getting real referrals from Teams and even Bluesky. The Teams means it’s probably being shared in work chats. My little URL is being copied around and given to people who want quick information. This is the entire intent of this project.\n\nBest of all, 53% of the visitors are in Nevada, and Reno and Sparks are the top two cities by a wide margin. It reached the people it was for.\n\nSearch referrals are also interesting, in last three hours, Bing 76, Yahoo 43, DuckDuckGo 28, and Google 18. Despite the size of Google, they’re last, only because I assume some random website is being deprioritized to official sources, which is probably the correct thing to do.\n\nI’ve got Claude doing a web search for me every hour, summarizing new news, and proposing changes to the site. I’m not really trying to drive any traffic, I’ve got no advertising, and I don’t want to compete with real news sites. I just want a list of links I can give to people.\n\nThere seems to be a real need for these custom emergency sites. That’s probably a good thing. We tech people will provide. I don’t know where this leads from here.\n\n[Email me](mailto:lance@orner.net) if you’d like, but I’m also going to post\nthis to Hacker News, and I’d love to see some discussion of a new trend like\nthis. Maybe it’s not a new\ntrend, but with AI tools like Claude, it’s definitely much easier to create.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bespoke-websites-for-emergencies-are-an-active-thing", "canonical_source": "https://orner.net/posts/bespoke-websites-for-emergencies/", "published_at": "2026-08-12 22:11:35+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-12 22:41:50.059750+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Lance Orner", "Claude", "Bug Fire", "Reno", "Nevada", "bugfireinfo.com"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bespoke-websites-for-emergencies-are-an-active-thing", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bespoke-websites-for-emergencies-are-an-active-thing.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bespoke-websites-for-emergencies-are-an-active-thing.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/bespoke-websites-for-emergencies-are-an-active-thing.jsonld"}}