Web Development Status Report

Spring 2010

Jennifer Oxelson & Tom Yoksas

Unidata's web development effort supports the following six focus areas of the Unidata 2013 funding proposal:

  • Broadening participation and expanding community services
  • Developing and deploying useful tools
  • Enhancing user support services
  • Providing leadership in cyberinfrastructure
  • Promoting diversity by expanding opportunities

Retrospective report on the progress of work over the preceding six months

Web development the past six months has mainly been focused on efforts to complete the new website and modes of metrics data collection:

  • A significant amount of time has been spent in fleshing out and adding information to the database of metrics information introduced during the prior plaza status report.

    This database has grown to +19,000 entries and now includes foreign universities/academic institutions, government and military entities. (Note: lat/lon coordinates and other location data not yet available for the new entries.) Jen has been scrapping multiple websites and using other methods to programmatically glean as much data as possible. (The alternative and painful method if to google each domain to glean the information.)

    The following data will be added to the database of metrics information in the near future:

    • A list of US-based and international research laboratory institutions.
    • A relatively complete list the states, provinces, regions, etc., for each country.

    This database will be/already is a valuable resource identifying our community during metrics collection.

  • Jen has been working with Tom Whittaker and UPC staff in the area of metrics and data collection. The 2001 Usercomm survey data has been resurrected from an archived state for future use. The new data added to the database of metrics information has come about largely due to determining our active members/sites for the Usercomm site contact list.
  • A lot of work has been done to finalize the user registration system that will be deployed with our new website. The new system will make extensive use of the aforementioned database of metrics information to make the registration process a lot easier/quicker for the user. The new system will also go a long way to collect more standardized data from the user as well as contribute new information to the database of metrics information.

Also the usual: answering support tickets, upgrading web-related software on our many servers, fighting the omnipresent Blastwave/OpenCSW lib issues, maintaining mailman lists, handling the security/vulnerability threat du jour, herding cats developers in an effort to finalize our SVN environment, yada yada yada...

Plans for the next 6-12 months

  • Finish and deploy the new website.
  • Work with Mike & Brian to resolve the accursed Blastwave/OpenCSW lib issue (affects packages/software upgrades on various Solaris machines).
  • Finish the migration of the regOnline data to a local database. Create an interface for Tina to administer the workshop data.
  • Start work on a web-based interface for Mohan, Linda & staff to query and get at metrics data regarding website usage, mailing list activity, recent support activity, downloads stats & workshop participation data.
  • Start work on refactoring RTStats.
  • Work with John and Ethan to create a web-based interface for configuring the TDS.

Metrics data: Mar 1 2009 to Feb 28 2010

Website registrations:

A registration = the creation of a new website account.

Affiliation types
  # of Website Registrations   Demographics Lists of Sites Drilldown Maps
Total per year Per month Countries US vs non-US EDU vs non-EDU Core vs non-core List of core sites List of non-core sites List of known sites (core & non-core) EDUs per country EDUs per US state

Website account updates:

An account update = an update to an existing website account (!= website registration).

Affiliation types
  # of Account Updates   Demographics Lists of Sites Drilldown Maps
Total per year Per month Countries US vs non-US EDU vs non-EDU Core vs non-core List of core sites List of non-core sites List of known sites (core & non-core) EDUs per country EDUs per US state

Website login attempts:

A login attempt = an authentication attempt on the Unidata website (successful and/or unsuccessful).

Affiliation types
  # of Login Attempts   Demographics Lists of Sites Drilldown Maps
Total per year Per month Countries US vs non-US EDU vs non-EDU Core vs non-core List of core sites List of non-core sites List of known sites (core & non-core) EDUs per country EDUs per US state