Atlanta Water Shortage

Three new things that I hope will make this site a little more useful for you:

1. The latest forum posts are now listed in the sidebar on the right side of the page.
2. You can now receive e-mail notification of new comments by checking the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” box when leaving a comment on an item.
3. The top five users with the most comments are listed in the sidebar.  This total is reset monthly.

If you have any other suggestions or any news tips, be sure to let me know.

Thanks!

Mickey

I’ve updated the site search feature that you see on the right side of our home page. This one is powered by Google, which offers a few advantages, along with one disadvantage.

The disadvantage is that it can only search for items that Google knows about. This means that items that are only a day or two old might not show up. The old one searched our database directly, so it automatically knew about every post.

However, the old search box could only search the text in the posts that I write, and nothing else. This one will search the posts, the comments, the forums and the wiki. Being able to search all of those from one place seems to be our best move.

I hope it helps you find what you’re looking for!

ST Frequency, an AWS reader and a writer for Reality Sandwich has written up a very nice article about the community that has formed around this site.

The article talks about the drought in general, the media response, then gets into quite a bit of detail about the site.  It’s a very nice summary of both the drought and the site.  Read it!

With the wealth of information about the drought that is available, we thought a wiki might be a good way to help organize it.

You are encouraged to participate and help build a strong collection of facts and information about the drought. There are about 17 pages so far, including things such as the scheduled daily releases from Buford Dam, definitions for things like cfs and AMSL and a variety of other things.

Some people are confused about the difference between our forums and our wiki. In short, the wiki is for purely factual information, while the forums are designed to share ideas and opinions. For example:

• “A prayer vigil was held on Tuesday, November 13 to pray for rain…” — This could go in a wiki entry.
• “The government doesn’t need to get involved with praying for rain…” — This would in the forums.

I hope that this becomes a useful resource for many of you.

The little forum we had on here was kind of nice, but it was not a robust enough script to handle things.  I’ve installed a much better one now for you to use.  In addition, I copied most the threads from the old forum so that interesting discussions from there could carry on.

You’ll need to register for a new account on there, but I otherwise hope you find the new forum easier to use.  Here’s a link to it.

Thanks.

We’ve installed and configured a forum for you to use to discuss the drought.  Head in there and share tips, ideas and concerns with others.

Please let me know if you have any problems with it.

To go along with our new “Lanier Status” page that shows the current water level of the lake, we’ve now added a “Lanier Rainfall” page that shows recent rainfall totals at the lake.

The new rainfall page also shows the change in lake level as a result of the rain.  So far, they’re all negative — the lake continues to drop despite the rain.  However, that might change today, as the lake is currently about 0.02 feet (1/4 of an inch) higher than it was at midnight, but we’ll see how it ends up.