Alertpedia.com Blog

Let’s face it.. we are constantly running out of time juggling so many things at home that we sometimes need “helpers” - the perfect nanny, handyman, cleaning services, lawn care, etc. Some times we just go Google, find who we want, and are done. Some times we don’t find the right service, but know that something will pop up one day.. so we put off hiring one for now. How about if the Web came calling when such helpers become available in your area?

That’s what alerts on “Local services” do at Alertpedia. Tell Alertpedia that you are looking for a nanny in your area, and forget about it.. Alertpedia will send you free email alerts when a nanny becomes available. Here are some examples:

• Tell me when a “nanny” becomes available in “Ann Arbor, MI”
• Tell me when a “tree cutter” becomes available in “Austin, TX”
• Tell me when a “handyman” or “mover” becomes available in “Chicago, IL”

No more checking the web every day and definitely on more trying your hand at handymanny again. Isn’t life sweet?

We hope that this truly saves you some time so you can do more useful things that you are truly passionate about. And, if you find a great service, please report it on Alertpedia so that others can also benefit from that service.

And, pass on this service to your friends; after all that’s what friendship is about - sharing tips about best nanny and handyman.. so that we can get back to Beer and shopping, the real stuff that friendship is about

Dharani
Alertpedia: Looking out for you busy households

My kids love Dora and Diego. And, who doesn’t like a yard sale in the neighborhood, or a Eric Clapton concert? The only problem is that I don’t have time to keep checking when Dora is coming to town or when someone decides to share their “junk” with the rest of the community this weekend.

Alertpedia to the rescue! You can now receive alerts on local events  in any area of your choice, for free. For example,

• Tell me when there is a “Dora” event in “New York, NY”.
• Tell me when “Clapton” plays in “Austin, TX”.
• Tell me when there is a “yard sale” in “Ann Arbor, MI”.

You will get alerts for yard sales in Ann Arbor and some miles around it. So, even if you don’t find your exact town in the location dropdown, pick a nearby city and you should be good. If that doesn’t suffice, let us know and we will gladly add your wonderful town to the list.

Hope your weekends are filled with some more fun! And be sure to let us know how you like these alerts or if you want to see something more. As with any good thing in life, please share this  news with your friends.

- Dharani

How often do we check career sites looking for that dream job in our dream location? (and then reality checks in and the current boss walks in with a project plan. ) The good news is that there are dozens of those perfect jobs out there for each of us. But they disappear while we have our heads deep in the current job. Like the mighty mouse discovered in  “Who Moved My Cheese” don’t stop looking for a job even when the current one seems very secure, especially when the economy is turbulent.

Well, here’s how you can have your current job and not miss the dream job too. Alertpedia now supports job alerts by area and category!

e.g., Alert me when there is a “Healthcare” job in “Chicago, IL”

You can filter the alerts on search text:

• e.g., Alert me when there is a “Healthcare” job in “Chicago, IL” with the keyword “nurse” in the title
• Alert me when there is a “Software developer” job in “Austin, TX”, with the keyword “AJAX” in the title

Set up as many as you need. It’s free. Watch them daily or weekly. Be sure to let us know if something is missing from the feature, like your favorite job category.

PS: And good luck with finding your dream job! Drop us a note if you found something useful via Alertpedia alerts. We like to believe that we are making a difference!

While you are in the job hunting mode, here’s another good book to find your dream job: What Color is Your Parachute?.

-Dharani

Fellow Moms-of-the-world,

Alertpedia is my 2nd project, the first being bringing up my kids. There is a selfish motive in running Alertpedia (no, not the Google ads, no one clicks on them ever!) - safety, health, and savings for my own family! And, of course, since one thing we moms are constantly short of is TIME, it’s better that someone else (Alertpedia) takes care of this while I can do other fun things (like signing up our kids for MORE activities )

So, here’re some alerts I set up on towards my own needs:

Safety & Health of my family:

• Product and food recalls (for: “lead” “peanuts” “allergies” etc.)
• Health and Fitness (tell me when there’s some news about asthma, avian flu, allergies, exercise tips, or a new diet guru telling us how cholesterol is actually good for us ;))
• Severe Weather (tell me when there’s a thunderstorm warning or another snow-shoveling day coming up for my area)

Save some money:

• House prices in my area (Tell me when a house goes on sale in my zip code so I know how much I really have with the house. Tell me what houses are selling for in California these days so I can stop all this california dreamin’.)
• Craigslist - (tell me when someone posts a Wii for sale in the tri-state area Craigslist. Tell me when a nanny or a web designer is affordable in the area. )
• Air fare deals (tell me when there’s a sale on flight from Newark to Honolulu so I can start packing for aloha land!)

Stay informed:

• Traffic (tell me if there’s bad traffic on I-695 during my commute hours so I can take Route-47 and get stuck in the congestion there, instead )
• News (tell me when my kid’s school or my hometown or “soccermom” comes in the new)

I don’t personally have alerts set up on Earthquakes because I don’t live in California.. hmmm but earthquakes can occur anywhere (except on the moon, they have moonquakes there), so may be I should set one up just in case !
Hope that helps,

Dharani
Alertpedia: Looking out for you moms

Folks,

We started Alertpedia in the beginning with a very simple goal: alert us about product recalls and earthquakes. Over time it has grown to include many more categories that improve the safety and savings of everyone, while saving time from repeatedly monitoring websites.

Well.. choices lead to questions, and questions lead to a blog post such as this

Question: What are some example alerts I can use Alertpedia for? 

Answer:

• House prices in a zip code (e.g., tell me when a 3-bd room house goes on sale in my zip code for 600k-800k)
• Craigslist - things on sale, jobs in your area (tell me when someone posts a Wii for sale in Philadelphia on Craigslist; tell me when someone needs a web designer in NYC)  
• Product and food recalls (tell me when there is a toy recall due to lead, food recalled due to peanuts)
• Air fare deals (tell me when there’s a sale on flight from Newark to Seattle) 
• Health news (tell me when there’s some news about asthma, avian flu)
• Traffic (tell me if there’s bad traffic on I-695 during my commute hours)
• Weather (tell me when there’s a thunderstorm warning for my county)
• News (tell me when “obama” comes in the news)
• Earthquakes (tell me when there’s an earthquake in California)

 Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have more questions!

thank you, Dharani
Alertpedia: Looking out for you.

So, everyone is watching the real estate bubble wobble all around us in the USA. The buyers are watching the prices fall and waiting for that bottom . The sellers are watching the prices fall and waiting for them to reverse course.
Bottomline: Everyone is watching the house prices. Like,

• The neighbors sold their house for WHAT??
• What are houses like ours selling for these days in *my* area? (not just some nationwide average that groups Manhattan mansions with our Suburbia)
• When can I afford that McMansion in Sunnyvale?

The team at Alertpedia is happy relieved to finally add house price alerts to Alertpedia so that all of us can stay on top of this thriller. This is what you do to start getting your email alerts as houses go on sale in your area:

1.  Go to real estate alerts page on Alertpedia
2. Enter the ZIP code where you want to monitor house prices (you live there? you want to move there?)
3. Select a price range, type of house, # bathrooms, # bedrooms [or leave some of them as Any to get all the alerts for that Zip code. But, that may be too many.]
4. Submit

Simple. Now, sit back, relax, and let Alertpedia do the watching for you.

PS: One thing we know for certain: everyone needs shelter. The housing market will turn around one of these days.. or months.. or years. The rumor is that real estate is really hot on Mars these days!!

Dharani

This week we launched the new design. Believe us, developing PHP is easier than picking colors, any day.

In the end, Looks are not everything, but they are the first thing a visitor notices - and we know what they say about first impressions. We decided to go with the mainstream 2.0 look (reflections, shading, larger fonts) that is really popular these days and added our own minimalist, clean touch to it. The new logo is pretty cool, isn’t it? Kind of like digg, addthis, etc. There are plans for spreading it, stay tuned. 

But we also went beyond just cosmetics with this upgrade: we added easy social bookmarking links (via addthis.com) so that you can easily add any web page / blog / alert on Alertpedia to your favorite bookmarking site, like digg, delicious, reddit, etc.

What else did we do with this release..

• made it easier for users to participate: no logins needed to add comments.
• added RSS feeds
• added google ads.. ok, this is not a feature for anyone except Google
• fixed bugs, not that there were too many to start with
• and, did I say we revamped the site’s look and feel? like, adding a launch page?

Do you like the new look? Please provide your valuable comments on what you like or don’t like. Usability is easier with user feedback!
Here’s the OLD and the NEW at a quick glance.

- dharani

We have just added two new alert categories by popular demand:

Traffic alerts: Get alerts when there is congestion / repairs / jam on your commute road during the times you pick.

e.g., email me when there is bad traffic on I-278 at 8AM. We will send you alerts during 7-9

Travel alerts: Get alerts when ANY airline announces a price cut between two US cities.

This is why Craigslist works better than Ebay for me: it is local, it is fast. You want something, you look up in your area on craigslist, find it, drive down 15min, check it out, bring it home, done.

Instant gratification and the ability to check out the product beats buying a black box from some seller in Estonia.

But the secret is out. So many people are buying via craigslist that items disappear before you get some free time to check it out. On the other hand, you can’t skip your work and meals and watch craigslist just in the hope that someone will post that Wii for $50.

Alertpedia to the rescue. You can now receive alerts when there is a posting about some item on Craigslist in your area. Isn’t that neat?

Like, how about a Wii on sale for $50 in new york city? Wouldn’t we all love that?

Thank you for visiting Alertpedia (originally called alertearth.org). This blog is intended for feature announcements, thoughts, and user feedback on the website http://www.alertpedia.com, a non-profit web service for email alerts on health news, product recalls, earthquakes, weather events and more. The site was started in response to the Indian ocean tsunami but has since grown.

Here’s a bit more on Alertpedia:

What is Alertpedia? Alertpedia is a free, reliable, and comprehensive online alerting service - like Wikipedia for Alerts. It monitors hundreds of reliable news sources and sends out email alerts when there is information of importance to you. This way, all of us can lead safer lives with more free time to do other things! Examples:

• Health: High levels of bacteria detected in local lakes, or new tips / cures for dealing with asthma
• Product Recalls: Certain toys are recalled due to unacceptable levels of lead; or food with peanuts in them.
• Weather: A thunderstorm is headed towards Somerset county, NJ
• Earthquakes: A 5.2 quake occurred in California 1hr ago

We are constantly adding new features and news categories to the site - our goal is to make this a one-stop shop for alerts on all of world’s information.

What are the benefits of using Alertpedia ?

1. Stay safe by being better informed
2. Save time. You can now avoid repeatedly checking zillions of websites for infrequent and unpredictable events.
3. Single place to monitor hundreds of reliable information sources
4. You get a chance to help others by reporting alerts to the site

How does it get the information? Alertpedia continuously monitors and gathers information from hundreds of reliable sources like the US govt bulletins, Yahoo!, etc. Users, like you, have the ability to report news items you come across and add to the many valuable sources of information.

How to get the most out of Alertpedia?

1. Use filter words or specific search terms when you set up alerts.
2. If you happen to chance upon useful news articles anywhere on the internet, report it at the site for the benefit of yourself & other users.
3. Spread the word. Tell your friends to sign-up for their alerts. Our experience has been that they will be thankful to you!

Dharani