PublicAlerts sends emergency alerts via text, email, or voice message. It's a *free service for anyone who lives, works, or visits the Portland-Vancouver Region. Personal information is kept secure and private. (*Message and data rates may apply depending on your provider and phone services.)

In cases of emergency, many organizations need a quick way to publish critical information. But existing (CMS) websites are often unable to handle sudden spikes in traffic. Like so many others, I’m currently in voluntary quarantine at home - and I used some time this weekend to put a small boilerplate together for this exact usecase. Here’s the main idea: • generate a static site with Eleventy • minimal markup, inlined CSS • aim to transmit everything in the first connection roundtrip (~14KB) • progressively enable offline-support w/ Service Worker • set up Netlify CMS for easy content editing • one-click deployment via Netlify The site contains only the bare minimum - no webfonts, no tracking, no unnecessary images. The entire thing should fit in a single HTTP request. It’s basically just a small, ultra-lean blog focused on maximum resilience and accessibility. The Service Worker takes it a step further from there so if you’ve visited the site once, the information is still accessible even if you lose network coverage. The end result is just a set of static files that can be easily hosted on cloud infrastructure and put on a CDN. Netlify does this out of the box, but other providers or privately owned servers are possible as well.

Wherein Rob Delaney makes the case for universal health care better than the Obama campaign. I am of the opinion, as a dad, a husband (of a woman with reproductive organs), a tax payer, a voter and an American living inside a human body, that improving the mechanisms for delivering health care in this nation is as high a priority as we will ever have. Why? When you unshackle good, hard-working, kind, enterprising Americans from the fear that health care costs could bankrupt them, you will unleash an intellectual and economic force that will knock your socks right off your feet, whether you bought them at Brooks Brothers or Goodwill.

I saw this linked as a ‘great article from 2010’ and thought ‘WTF I read about this a long time ago’ and looked in my bookmark history, and there's this little page by David Carkeet (http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/carkeet.html), and this Popular Mechanics article makes no mention of that (why would it?) but it is totally great.

How to survive a free-fall from an airplane.