Web call, March 10, 2003

Andy Bray (NEWMOA), Tim Tompkins, Curt McCracken, and John Calcagni (WRRC), Jini Cook, Joy Scrogum, and Blake Harvey (WMRC), HilarioGamez and Chris Gonzalez (SWP2C), Daeho Kim (P2RIC), Laura Estes (Peaks to Prairies), Pete Johnsen (WRPPN), Crispin Stutzman (PPRC), Scott Butner (Batelle), Beth Anderson (EPA), and Jean Waters (P2Rx) were on the call.

Action items

(1) post web trends reports on web site (privately or publically) by March 24, see top referrers, top pages, path through site, try to get useful information to help us improve out sites. (a) what search engines are referring to our sites, (b) what content is being accessed, (c) get marketing info. Just post the reports as they are, don’t run new reports. Andy, OK, John, OK, Jini, no, Chris OK, Daeho, OK, Laura, OK Pete off, Crispin OK (1 hour)
(2) Programs directory subcommittee on QA/QC (Laura, Crispin, and Jean) needs to meet after getting comments from Jini and Andy.
(3) Implement EPA search engine on web site, if desired.
(4) Make sure “get hub updates” and “give hub updates” are current, eliminate null values from topic hub database date stamp field.

Summary

Search Engine –

• Six centers are indexed for EPA search engine, SWP2C is ready to be indexed and WRRC is not. It’s not clear if WRRC will participate in this search effort. SWP2C will send e-mail to Scott so their site can be searched. EPA will index it following receipt of e-mail, within approximately 2 – 4 weeks.
• Peaks is the only center to put implement the EPA search engine function on their site. Code is available for other centers. Implementation is optional for centers. Advantages are that it allows search of all indexed P2Rx sites, plus search of all EPA sites. Resources required, approximately one hour.
• EPA is considering switching from their own search engine to Google, have been talking about this for over a year. WRRC is looking into Google for their site.

Web Trends Reporting –

• John and Jean want to view everyone’s web trends reports on-line to assess whether all sites are utilizing the same criteria for their web trends reports, and to see what other information can be collectively discerned from the reports. Examples include, top referrers (will help us know how people get to our site, whether from the EPA search, Google, or other link), top pages viewed (will help us know what materials people are looking for on our sites), etc. These reports will also potentially provide marketing information to the marketing professionals.
• All centers except WMRC (who’s reports were deleted) and WRPPN (who was off the call) agreed to post their reports by March 24, and provide addresses to John and Jean. Resources required, approximately 1 hour.

Topic Hub Code –

• Tim is working on modularization of code. He expects to be finished with the “user interface” part by March 31. He asked for peer review to help with documentation and commenting of code. Scott was volunteered (and later agreed) to help.
• Daeho reported that from working with Laura on content sharing, he found some null values in the “date stamp field” but these need to have a date in them. This problem was fixed in Reno (via cold fusion coding), but records prior to Reno may still contain null values. Centers should eliminate the null values from their databases. Daeho changed the field attribute so the default value is “current date.” Centers need to take a look at their databases and they need to be sure they have the current version of “give hub updates” and “get hub updates” from the CVS server. Resources vary per center but should be less than a half day. Programs Directory –
• Jini and Andy both said they have comments on the draft of “how to describe programs” which is needed for Programs Directory QA/QC standard. Upon receipt of these comments, Laura, Crispin, and Jean will meet to revise the draft and submit this portion to the admin group. Comments are expected within two weeks. New draft is expected to be presented by the April admin meeting. Resources expected, Laura & Crispin, three hours.
• Daeho reported the planned data dump will begin the week of May 19 and is expected to be completed by June 30. Resources expected from each center, less than one hour.
• Daeho will begin programming the input forms for simultaneous data entry into their regional programs directory and the national programs directory right after the data dump. He expects to complete this work in July. Resources expected for each center, half day to “cut and paste” code into existing form, or to globally replace existing form with new form. Half day to trouble shoot. Half day of staff time to assure records that were changed between the time of the data dump and the time of form installation are corrected in national directory.

Review search engine status

Scott provided the following information based on his manual review of the web sites:

Site

GLRPPR
NEWMOA
P2RIC
Peaks
PPRC
WRPPN
SWP2C
WRRC

Reaction by the group to this report: Chris will send e-mail to Scott to get indexing started for SWP2C. WRRC looks like they haven’t meta tagged yet, will talk about plans off line. Andy was waiting to hear that NEWMOA had been indexed, so now will go ahead with implementation.

Pete asked Laura to share search implementation code so WRPPN can put the EPA search on their site. (WRPPN had the EPA search engine up but needed to redo it since Chuck left.) Laura will share code with everyone; it’s the same thing Greg sent out in Reno. Daeho also sent one out. Daeho’s let you go to 255 records individually; Center’s can contact Daeho for this code if they can’t find it.

We discussed whether or not the topic hub code has been modified to include “no follow/no index” tags so shared hubs aren’t indexed on the sharer’s site. The Metatags.cfm file should do this. It is on the CVS server, Crispin has implemented this and it seems to be working.

So far Scott hasn’t seen any use of the group metatag we discussed in Reno. Scott suggests we defer implementation until we get a better read from EPA on the search engine. All centers agreed to defer this implementation.

Scott is under a task order from Beth so he can provide more robust support with the search engine. Some centers haven’t implemented tags or haven’t implemented the search engine. Scott can help if Center’s are struggling with technical details, if staff issues are preventing implementation (time priorities), Scott can’t help. J

Scott would like to see Center’s web trends reports to see how many referrals we’re getting from the EPA search engine (oaspub.epa.gov). We could easily look at “top referrers” to see if EPA is in there. (Later in the meeting most centers agreed to post their web trends reports.)

John had a conversation with John Shirey (EPA employee) about the search engine. EPA is trying to get a new contract to use Google as the search engine. They need to get $350K to move forward with Google, however. It sounds like they may not continue to be support the search engine. Scott notes that this discussion has happened for the last year.

Implications for P2Rx are yet to be determined. It could be a simple as having our sites reindexed and using the same tags but Scott doubts it. Google already supports a programming interface like EPA developed for verity search engine but it won’t be exactly the same. It’s too early to know how much work this will be or if it will happen.

John provided some information on what he’s learned about getting Google for their site. The introductory level service is free but includes no indexing. The second level costs $600/month, provides your site the Google engine without advertising but doesn’t index your site, the third level does index but price is unknown. Finally, Google will send a box (hardware) for use on your site. It costs $28K for two years.

Scott adds that using the in-house search engine doesn’t let you index content on other domains (for example, the rest of P2Rx). John sees advantage that if we go with Google search, they’ll index all our pages. This would improve our site’s usability by others.

Web trends reporting

John and Jean would like to look at everyone’s web trends reports to make sure we’re all capturing the same information for web trends reports. Also, there are several other items on web trends reports we would like to examine to see if the reports can be more useful to us. Examples of items we’d like to look at include, top referrers, and top pages. From the top referrers, you can tell how people are getting to your site (through a search engine or a link from another site). The top pages help you know what people are looking for, which may help prioritize resources for updating pages or creating new pages. By looking at aggregated information from all centers, we should be able to help each other.

Jean asked for all centers to post their existing web trends reports on the web (can post at a private address if they don’t want to post publicly). Jean and John will then review the reports. It is estimated that it will take less than one hour to post the existing reports. Reports should be posted by March 24. Jini reported that they no longer have the reports as Todd deleted them prior to leaving. The response was: Andy, OK, John, OK, Jini, no, Chris OK, Daeho, OK, Laura, OK Pete off, Crispin OK. John offered to do “web trends 101” with everyone.

Topic hub code, Content sharing, Bug reporting

Tim is currently working on modularization of the user interface part of topic hub code. He expects to be finished in about two weeks. Tim will attempt to comment the code as much as he can, then wants peer review. Andy will help where he can but he’s busy in March. Jean will ask Scott for help.

Daeho went through Laura’s site and found two problems, one was null values in the database where there should be a date. Daeho advised centers to have the most current files from the CVS, especially “give hub update” and “get hub update”files.

In Reno we fixed the date stamp in the database. Some records have blank date stamps because they were added before Reno. Laura used the current date to replace the null values with dates. Daeho set the current date as default in Access. The default value should be for new records,but null values can be updated with the current date if needed. Once you input data, the date stamp should be the day you input data.

Laura mentioned that she lost some data recently, she lost associations of links to hubs. There’s no longer a record of what hubs the links are related to, or whether or not they’re core links. The group discussed this issue a little bit but no resolution was reached.

Update from Austin Administrative Meeting

Andy and Laura will supply the updates from the web meetings to the administrative meetings since they are on both calls. They need to supply administrative folks the following information when reporting out from the web group:

• understandable summaries of web work
• alerts to problem areas and possible solutions
• clear reporting of status of projects
• planned time commitments

The administrative group expressed the need to make things less people-dependent and more historical, need to document what we already have and comment in the code.

A full summary of the administrative meeting is found at http://www.p2rx.org/AdminInfo/AustinMeeting.cfm

Programs Directory

Daeho reported on the schedule for work on the programs directory. He’ll plan to begin the“data dump”the week of May 19 and finishby June 30. Then he’ll work on the input forms for each center, which will allow simultaneous entry of information to the center’s regional program directory and to the national program directory in July.

Daeho asked Andy to send NEWMOA’s data entry form to him so he can see how it’s done.

On the programs directory QA/QC, comments from Jini, and Andy are still needed, then Crispin, Laura, and Jean need to get together again to review the standard. The QA/QC standard needs to be revised by 9/30/02.

Announcements:

Pete announced that Fiona is a new student employee at WRPPN. Amana and Fiona would both like to talk to someone about functionality of content sharing. Andy agreed to help, they’ll set up a time in a couple of weeks.

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