swas blog

We have much left to do at Swas Inc. in 2010; increasing our speed and expanding our service’s availability to more people top the list, and that is just the top of a very long to-do list. In 2009 we did manage to finally build the foundation, the most important parts of our service. We deliver the fastest weather alerts anywhere and we deliver them free, and now our service is fully accessible by most cell phones.

We did not achieve these basic goals without help, and we do not believe that it’s appropriate to overlook or fail to acknowledge the people who helped us build this foundation. Swas Inc. would not exist if it were not for the efforts of these wonderful people. So as we close out 2009 we would like to thank the most significant contributors to our growth and survival.

First there is Mario Menti of Twitterfeed who we have already thanked in a previous post, but the bridge he built for us and the knowledge he passed along to us was priceless, and deserves mention again. Without Twitterfeed we would have spent our first five months utilizing cups and strings to get our feeds out. Mario gave us a home while we toiled away building our own system.

With that in mind, we next have to thank our early followers, who really demonstrated extreme patience and loyalty while we pieced our system together. In no way could we have been considered a “Stealth Start-up”, as there we were, bones and tissue hanging out everywhere. These people performed the equivalent of buying a car without an engine, hoping that at some point, we might add that engine. Well we finally added the engine and I still couldn’t thank all of them enough. While we truly appreciate the 500,000 plus followers we have now, we will never forget those people who were there with us in the very humblest of beginnings.

Then we must thank everyone over at NOAA’s National Weather Service. They have been tirelessly supportive and informative, and as a bonus, many of their employees are some of our most dedicated followers. Most importantly we would not have any feeds to send without them, and the excellent work their employees do on a daily basis, with little or next to no credit.

Next there’s the good people of Twitter, and especially the platform team. Not only have they rapidly addressed all of the problems we brought to their attention, but the efforts of the platform team have allowed us to reach out and touch people on other services, and it did not cost us a dime to do so. Imagine being able to cross items off of your to-do list because another company already did all the work for you.

Finally, at one point a few months ago, not only was a mountain in front of us, but that mountain was crushing down on top of us. We were literally days away from dissolving into nothingness. One person, who I might add had nothing to gain, stepped in and lifted the mountain off of us, and frankly, he was one of a tiny few who could have helped us in that situation.

Why he chose to help us, we may never know, but if one person could take the lion’s share of the credit for saving our project it would be John Borthwick. It takes more than luck to get a project like this off the ground, sometimes it takes an angel, and that is how we will forever view John. I think he just may have wound up on our permanent Christmas Card/Thank you list.

Thanks to everyone who helped us make it through 2009 and may all of you safely return in 2010.

Happy New Year

How do you follow up delivering the fastest weather alerts on the planet? One of many ways we will do that is to assure that we make our weather feeds even faster. We are about to begin testing the second round of speed increases, and hopefully, in less than three weeks, we will switch them live.

Right now, our slowest feeds (smallest cities) fetch on an average of two and a half minutes. After the upgrade is complete, these same feeds will fetch in an average of one and a half minutes. To give you some perspective, the next closest fetch times to ours are offered by Superfeedr who guarantees they will fetch up to a thousand feeds within fifteen minutes. That is our slowest time of one minute and a half versus fifteen minutes.

Better still, this upgrade will double the number of accounts we send out in an average of just seconds, and we will distribute that speed in the same manner we did in the first round of increases; fastest speeds going to the largest populations.

We have several other improvements scheduled for the first quarter of 2010 and we will talk more about them here in the coming weeks but right now, we are going to focus on making the fastest weather alerts available even faster.

It was brought to our attention by one of our followers that the weather observation pages for the western half of the country were not working properly.  The problem has been remedied and this is where we also get to introduce a new member on our team:

Liquidweb. the truly fine people who are partly responsible for the outage.

Liquidweb is a tad bit protective of their servers and we are guilty of doing some things a little differently than Liquidweb’s security protocols are used to tolerating. We have had a heart-to-heart talk with Liquidweb’s security bots (read: rabid dogs) through the “heroic customer service support team” for Liquidweb.

We told those highly protective bots that Santa wasn’t going to bring them anything this year if they did not basically, stop barking at swasalert.com….. or no doggie biscuits for Fido.

For about the next hour, both eastern and western observations servers may be running a little slow while the dogs are put back behind the fence and muzzled. Permanently we hope.

The addition of  Liquidweb is in no way a slight to Inmotion Hosting, and their dogs are definitely getting treats in their stockings. We had to add another host, simply because Inmotion did not have enough data centers in all of the ridiculous places we wanted to install them.

You know, enough servers, spread out far enough, so most likely only one of them would have downtime at any given moment, rather than something like what happens to Twitter, just once in a blue moon.

Anyway, the one that went down is now back up.

Happy Holidays to all good doggies.

–gisher

When you click on any warning link now (on Twitter) from the western part of the country, you will be directed to a new server, as well as a new design. These changes have been made to assure that all weather warning details are more accessible for most cell phones. It may take several hours for the changes to propagate across all of the country, but many locations are already reaching the new server as of this moment. The east-warning server should begin coming online later today.

Our next step will be to carry the redesign over to the main site and it will affect every section of the main site accept the blog. We will post additional updates about the changeover on this blog shortly after they take effect.