Benibilgilendir.com (Deprecated)
Earthquake alert email service with cron jobs and SMTP delivery. (Deprecated)
Built benibilgilendir.com as a real-time earthquake alert platform that monitors AFAD and USGS data for events above magnitude 3.5 within a 200 km radius of Istanbul and sends automated email notifications. The system was built with Next.js and a Node.js backend, running 5-minute cron cycles with SMTP-based delivery and a GPT-4o-written comment on each event. While official sites were going down under the traffic, the platform sustained 99.9% uptime, and every alert sent to a valid address was delivered. Deprecated: the website remains accessible, but the mail system is no longer operational.
Context
After the magnitude 5.8 earthquake off Silivri on 23 April 2025, Istanbul spent weeks feeling every aftershock. People wanted to know what had just happened, and the official sites they turned to kept going down under the load.
Problem
The information existed, but it was hardest to reach exactly when people needed it. Refreshing a crashed page in the middle of the night does nothing for someone's anxiety. The service had to stay up when the official sources slowed down or failed, and a bare magnitude number wasn't enough: people wanted to know whether they should worry.
Approach
I built it as a small public-good project around one idea: the news should come to you, so you don't have to go looking for it. A cron job polled AFAD and USGS every five minutes, and the two sources backed each other up, so when one stalled the other kept the feed alive. Events were filtered to magnitude 3.5+ within 200 km of Istanbul and sent over SMTP to everyone on the list. Each email named its source and carried a short GPT-4o-written comment that put the depth, magnitude and distance in plain words.
Outcome
Over the two to three months it ran, roughly 100–150 people signed up through social media shares and word of mouth, and the system sent more than 1,000 alerts with 99.9% measured uptime. The only failed deliveries came from mistyped email addresses at signup. Once the aftershocks faded and sign-ups dropped, I shut the mail system down on purpose: it had done the job it was built for.