For neighborhood websites

Put a live “helicopters over your neighborhood” badge on your site

One line of HTML. It shows what’s over your neighborhood right now, updates itself every two minutes, and links to the live map and the neighborhood’s history. Free, with no ads and nothing that tracks your visitors.

What it looks like

A small card with the GTLA Live wordmark, the line “Helicopters over Silver Lake right now”, our one-sentence answer for that moment, and one link. Here is Silver Lake’s, live:

The sentence is the same one at the top of the neighborhood’s own page, so the badge can never say something the page doesn’t. When a helicopter is overhead it names the operator — a police department, a sheriff’s department, a TV station — and the aircraft’s registration. A privately owned helicopter is called just that, never by its owner’s name. When our feed is down, the badge shows the link and nothing else, rather than pretending the sky is quiet.

Who it’s for

Neighborhood councils, homeowners’ and residents’ associations, local blogs and newsletters, Patch and Nextdoor-style community pages, real estate agents’ neighborhood pages, and the wiki or sidebar of a neighborhood forum. Anywhere people ask “why is there a helicopter over us?”

How to add it

1. Open your neighborhood’s page from the list of neighborhoods.
2. Scroll to Put this on your site and press Copy next to the version your site takes. There are three.
3. Paste it into your page where the badge should appear. That’s it.

For most sites, one line:

If your site won’t run scripts (Squarespace, some HOA site builders, Substack’s HTML block), a frame:

If it allows neither, a plain link and picture (this one doesn’t update by itself):

Add data-theme="light" to the first version, or ?theme=lightto the frame’s address, for a light card. The badge fits any space 240 pixels wide or wider.

The terms

• It’s free, for any website.
• Keep the link and the GTLA Live wordmark as they are. The badge is ours; the link back is how it pays for itself.
• Don’t scrape. The badge is the way to show our sentence on your site; don’t copy our pages or read our data for anything else, and don’t store or republish what the badge says.
• We may change how the badge looks or works, or withdraw it, at any time. If a change would affect your site, we’ll try to say so here first.
• It’s information, not an emergency service. We track aircraft from public broadcasts; the sentence can be late or wrong, and nothing here is advice. Using it doesn’t make your site part of GTLA, and it doesn’t make us part of yours.

Privacy

The badge calls our server only, to ask for the sentence. It sets no cookies, loads no fonts or scripts from anyone else, and we store nothing about your visitors — not their addresses, not their browsers, not what they looked at. The one thing we count is which websites the badge is on, by the site’s web address, as a daily total per site, so we know where it lives. Our privacy policy says the same in its own words.

Questions

Write to the contact address on the privacy page. If you’d rather we send you your neighborhood’s snippet, say which neighborhood.