Standing alerts

Get told when something changes

This site has no mailing list and no accounts, and it is not going to grow either one. Instead it publishes its record as files your own software can watch: three news-style feeds and one calendar. Nothing about you is sent anywhere to use them.

The four addresses

Copy the address of the one you want into your reader. Most people want the first one and nothing else.

  • RSS · recommended

    What's being built

    Every data center application filed with Loudoun County, and every movement in the county's record of what is built and what is proposed. Item titles say what changed in plain words — a real one from the current feed reads New application — site plan amendment: Ashburn Crossing II Parking Expansion, Broad Run district — so a phone notification is readable without opening anything. Each item links to the county's own file.

    https://loudoundatacenterwatch.org/feeds/activity.xml

    See the raw file

    Paste that address into any reader. One-click links for Feedly and Inoreader — both send you to a sign-in page first if you are not already logged in to that service.

  • RSS

    In the news

    Headlines about data centers and AI infrastructure in Loudoun and across Virginia, capped at the 50 most recent. Headline, outlet, date and link only — no article text and no summary written by anyone here, because nobody here has read the article. Inclusion is not endorsement.

    https://loudoundatacenterwatch.org/feeds/news.xml

    See the raw file

    Paste that address into any reader. One-click links for Feedly and Inoreader — both send you to a sign-in page first if you are not already logged in to that service.

  • RSS

    Everything

    The two feeds above merged into one, newest first, capped at the hundred most recent items — so the oldest county filings fall off this one first. Subscribe to this or to the other two: taking all three means seeing each item twice, and the county feed alone is the complete record.

    https://loudoundatacenterwatch.org/feeds/all.xml

    See the raw file

    Paste that address into any reader. One-click links for Feedly and Inoreader — both send you to a sign-in page first if you are not already logged in to that service.

  • Calendar · iCalendar (.ics)

    Filings and construction, as a calendar

    The same county record as a subscribable calendar: one all-day entry on the day each application was filed, and on the day each parcel-record change was noticed. Useful if you already live in a calendar and want county activity to land there beside everything else. Entries are marked free, so they never make you look busy.

    https://loudoundatacenterwatch.org/feeds/construction.ics

    Add to Google Calendar Add to Apple Calendar or Outlook Download the file

    Subscribe by address rather than downloading, or you get a snapshot that never updates again. In Google Calendar the manual route is Other calendars → From URL; in Apple Calendar it is File → New Calendar Subscription; in Outlook, Add calendar → Subscribe from web.

If you have never used a feed before

  1. Pick a reader. On a phone, NetNewsWire (iPhone and Mac, free, no account) or Feeder and Feeder for Android. In a browser, Feedly or Inoreader. All of these have a free tier that is more than enough for four feeds.
  2. Copy an address above. Long-press or right-click the address and choose Copy link.
  3. Paste it into the reader where it asks to add a feed or follow a site. That is the whole setup. New filings appear there from then on, usually within a day.

What a reader actually does

It fetches the address every so often — how often is its decision, not ours — and compares what it got against what it showed you last time. Each item carries an identifier that stays the same between rebuilds, so a story you have already seen is not shown to you again just because the file was regenerated.

Nothing in that loop involves this project knowing who you are. Your reader asks the web server for a file, exactly as your browser did to show you this page.

What the feeds do not include

Nothing from the community reports. Not a title, not a location, not a count. Reports are read by a person before they appear anywhere public, and a syndication file is the opposite of that: once an item is in a reader's cache or on a third-party service, it cannot be corrected, moderated or withdrawn. Reports also describe where somebody lives. Their map pins are already offset 100–200 m from the address given, by a database trigger, before the coordinates are ever stored — and a reporter's contact details are never sent to a browser at all. Pushing any of that into a feed would work against both of those protections, so the feeds carry only the county's public record and published news coverage.

To follow reports, read the reports page, where the moderation and the offsetting apply. How submissions are handled is set out in full in the privacy policy.

No subscriber list exists

There is no sign-up form on this page for a reason. Subscribing does not create an account, does not take an email address, and does not tell this project that you did it. We could not send you anything if we wanted to, and could not hand over a list of readers because there is no list to hand over.

The host that serves the files keeps ordinary web-server logs, the same as for every other page here. That is the whole of it.

Not an alert about your address

A feed is one file, identical for everybody. It cannot be filtered to "within a mile of my house", because doing that would mean sending us where your house is — and this site does not take a visitor's coordinates and send them anywhere.

For a near-me view, the map works out distances in your browser and keeps them there, and the watchlist is stored on your own device.

Where the contents come from

The feeds are generated files, not a separate source of information. They are built by scripts/build-feeds.py out of the same two files the site itself reads — data/activity.json and data/news.json — and rebuilt by the same scheduled job that refreshes those files, once a day. Nothing is added on the way through: every item carries the date its source gave it, and every county item links to the county's own record so you can read the filing rather than take our word for it.

Filings and parcel changes come from Loudoun County's land development case list and its built and proposed parcel layers; the same caveat as on What's being built applies here. Filings appear the day they are made, while the parcel layers are republished only every month or two, so a campus can be visibly under construction weeks before a feed item says so. Where an item names a district, that district was worked out from the coordinates the county publishes with the case, tested against the county's own district boundaries; where the county gave no usable coordinates, the item names no district rather than guessing at one.

An item with no usable date is left out entirely rather than dated today, because stamping a filing of unknown age with this morning's date would put it at the top of your reader as though it had just happened.

Something wrong in a feed, or a reader that will not take one of these addresses? Tell us — a feed nobody can subscribe to is worth nothing, and this is the sort of thing that breaks quietly.

Free public calendar

Meetings & Public Input

Find upcoming data-center hearings, open houses, transmission proceedings and participation deadlines. Filing dates remain in the separate construction calendar.

Browse meetings & deadlines · Subscribe to the public calendar