About Vancouver Island News

Vancouver Island News keeps our communities current without the noise. Everything that matters to island life — ferries, wildfires, outages, road closures, local events, and headlines — in one clean, fast feed.

Who this helps

• Residents who want timely local alerts without doomscrolling
• Commuters and travellers keeping an eye on ferries and roads
• Community-minded folks who follow local events and news

How it works

The site regularly checks trusted sources and brings them together in a location-aware feed. Key sources include:

• BC Wildfire Service for active wildfire status
• BC Ferries Current Conditions (beta) for sailing conditions and delays
• BC Hydro outages (GitHub dataset) for power information
• RCMP bulletins for public safety notices
• Municipal/community event calendars
• Local news outlets for breaking stories

Items are categorized by type and location so you can quickly zero in on your area.

Hey, I’m Jeromy Mobley from the Comox Valley — still based in Courtenay. This project is my way of giving back to the place that raised me.

I studied at North Island College (Business Administration, plus computer science coursework) and at Camosun College in Victoria (Hotel Restaurant Management). These days I manage a local restaurant and build this site in the early mornings and late evenings — a blend of hospitality, business, and tech rooted in island life.

Off-shift you’ll usually find me painting, grilling, or out with a camera. I taught myself to code (JavaScript, Python, PHP, CSS) and built this platform to be useful first and fancy second.

My goal is simple: a reliable, island-centric website you can check once and feel up to speed.

~ Jeromy

For the tech-curious, here’s what’s under the hood:

• Built with Next.js for speed and stability
• Scheduled background updates (Vercel Cron) throughout the day
• Edge-powered endpoints for quick responses where it counts
• Smart caching and CDN headers to keep pages snappy
• Mobile-first design that works well on any device

Updates run on a practical cadence: ferries about every 15 minutes; outages, road conditions, and news roughly every 30 minutes; wildfires and community events on routine intervals. Responses are served via edge functions where possible, with cache headers like s-maxage and stale-while-revalidate to keep things quick. No accounts required. No personal tracking.

Privacy: no accounts, no tracking — only anonymized server logs for reliability.

I’d like this project to pay its own way — lightly and locally. If you run a Vancouver Island business or community group and want to get in front of islanders without the clutter, I’m exploring small, respectful placements.

• Small sponsor cards in the sidebar
• Community spotlights for events and non-profits
• City- or region-specific placements (Comox Valley, Nanaimo, Victoria, etc.)