P2Rx Web Group Conference Call

Wednesday, September 25^th, 2008

Attendees: Beth Anderson (EPA), Jean Waters and Veronica Doga (P2Rx), Andy Bray and Nate Bisbee (NEWMOA), Curt McCracken & David Bond (WRRC), Tyler Rubach (GLRPPR), Tom Fort (Zerowaste), Zac Fowler (P2RIC), Wes Fleming (Peaks), Ryo Yamaki & John Hanzo (WSPPN), and Prabin Kanel (PPRC).

Action Items: Zerowaste, GLRPPR, and WRRC update their sites to change from WRPPN to WSPPN

Cookie Pilot Update:

Andy gave an update on NEWMOA/P2RX cookie pilot. This is a “first-party” cookie, the pop-up doesn’t appear until after a user has clicked on something on the site, and is persistent for 5 years.  It has a one time pop-up question. The pop-up would only reappear if the user deletes the cookie from their machine. There are four values for the cookie.  The default value is that the user did not want to answer. So if the person closes the pop-up without answering the question, the cookie will record the default, however the person will get the cookie anyway.  (We won’t know what type of user they are but we won’t ask them a question again.) This is also a good indicator of how annoyed of pop-up’s people are. Other options on the pop-up are to choose whether the user is a business, a TAP or they do not want to tell us. Jean suggested that after a while they might retrigger the pop-up for the users that did not answer first time.

We have to let users know how we are going to use the cookie information and in case the user really doesn’t want to have any more pop-ups from our website, they can contact NEWMOA and opt-out. NEWMOA will run Webtrends reports to show what kind of information a cookie can get and send it to all centers. We expect to be able to track what information users are using, how much time they’re on the site, etc. 

Topic Hubs Centralization: 

NEWMOA had an issue with their Internet Service Provider (ISP) who disabled NEWMOA and P2Rx websites because it was causing their cold fusion server to hang up. There was a problem with the cold fusion and they traced it back to Topic Hubs. Nate reworked some things in the software, including doing away with using Cold Fusion components, replacing them with modules, and increased process time on the Topic Hubs by two orders of magnitude.

The possibility of a mirror site was discussed and also the ways to do it. There also was a discussion who will host this mirror site. Tyler and Curt cannot do it, Zac possibly can. Prabin will check to see it the PPRC server could be used. Zac has half a box that is virtualized but would need cold fusion software.  The programs directory is being mirrored bon WRRC.  Cold fusion 8 would cost approximately $1,300.  There needs to be further discussion as to whether we need to mirror the whole site or just the data.

WRPPN to WSPPN move:

Jean asked if everybody did change the footnotes from their website from WRPPN to WSPPN, and reminded GLRPPR, Zerowaste, and WRRC that they should do it. WSPPN currently has three urls, westp2net, WRPPN, and WSPPN all pointing to WSPPN.

EPA indexing sites:

EPA indexes some of the centers websites, so if someone is doing a search on EPA website, they can find it on center website. EPA is trying to figure out how to optimize this process and what is the advantage of referring to center’s sites. EPA is looking at limiting the amount of this work they do, though, and NEWMOA has experienced about double the web logs because of EPA’s daily indexing.  Beth said EPA stopped indexing P2Pays and NEWMOA, and probably PPRC and WSPPN are already dropped too. Zero Waste was not even on the list. Peaks, P2RIC, and GLRPPR are still being indexed.  Beth will check on this and let us know.

Measurement Node Update

Prabin updated the group that the contractor, Windsor, is supposed to be at PPRC on Friday to complete the work on making the node-to-node connection with Colorado and all of EPA for the P2 Results database.

Programs Directory Update

Nate reported that there was a problem with numbering when users tried to update their information in the Programs Directory.  This is the same problem we had for centers – the different centers would have the same contact numbers in their database and when we combined the directory into a single database, we corrected this potential conflict by appending a number (related to the region number) to the contact ID.  We just didn’t make this fix for when the users updated their info. So, when a user tried to update their info, it would have overwritten the contact info for a different center. Fortunately, instead of overwriting data, it crashed and Nate fixed it

Potential for sharing the Topic Hubs:

Jean talked about the potential sharing Topic Hubs project with Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. There should be implemented some modifications because they don’t want all of the Topic Hubs, they just want some of them.