One of the guys on my team, Glen Campbell, went down with a bunch of other Yahoos to the Astrodome in Houston this weekend. He was there to help setup a computer network and general technical assistance.
On Saturday a page was created to help hurricane victims with resources to find their families and figure where to go from here.
On Sunday morning Glen paged me and asked if we could get an friendly URL for the page. Applarently “http://news.yahoo.com/fc/us/hurricane_katrina_resources” isn’t easy to dictacte over the phone. With a little mod_rewrite magic I setup “http://news.yahoo.com/katrinahelp“. This was not rocket science and something I’ve done dozens of times before, but never with so much impact. Glen and the other Yahoos down there were incredibly thankful.
It’s nice to know that the work I do can make this kind of impact with people in events such as this. News.yahoo.com had insane amounts of traffic last week, and we handled it well, throwing up a bunch of special pages too. The guys on my team did an awesome job responding quickly to urgent needs to support the site. Overall, Yahoo! has done amazing stuff to help, including raising over $50M!
thanks for posting these resources Jeff. one of my friends is from NO and her whole family is now living in her house in Spokane, WA. i passed these along to her and she found them very helpful. its nice to see so many resources on one page. searching around the web is the last thing they want to do right now.
good work!
db