It’s interesting, and humbling, regarding the attention — even clout — one receives when “NASA” and “WordPress” are used in the same sentence. See a search on Twitter for those two terms. But the persistence in using WordPress continues to pay off in terms of resource and budget management, overall maintenance time, Section 508 accessibility, and ease of use by clients with any knowledge of HTML. I expound upon the benefits here at the GRC Wordpress site.

However, another caveat I discover is that the sites I maintain at NASA using WordPress get ranked well in the search engine pages, sometimes even compared to other NASA sites with similar focus, even in NASA’s own search engine.

Here are a couple search examples, concerning recent public announcements:

• Researcher Kim de Groh’s recent induction into the 2009 Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame
  • Google search
  • NASA search
• A NASA team winning an award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer
  • Google search
  • NASA search

At the time of writing, in Google, the NASA Glenn Research & Technology Directorate web site was the only NASA site to appear in the top 10 search engine result page, while in the NASA Search engine, the results were #1.

Though the search engine results will change with time, and though this is a rather unscientific search study, the search results do highlight a more accurate generalization that the Directorate’s activities are effectively being made more widely available, very quickly.

Recent new work on the ICNS Conference led to Publications Chair responsibilities creating the 2008 ICNS Conference poster (pictured above) and the new ICNS Conference web site. Said conference was originally a NASA-organized event, but since 2007, has become co-sponsored by the IEEE AESS and AIAA DATC. My work on the conference continues in the communications and publications area.

Overview

1. Launch of new ICNS Conference web site, enabling Wordpress as a content management system (CMS) with features to allow group editing based on role management , built-in search engine optimization (SEO) functionality, event calendar database, image management, and other dynamic features.
2. Creation of ICNS Conference poster to convey 2008 theme, “Information Takes Flight,” to contain transmission of digital data across multiple objects in airspace, updated color scheme, and historical design consistency.

Whether or not this option will be easier or more efficient than one of these recommended combinations remains to be seen:

1. Blogger with Picasa Web Albums: If I were using a Windows-based computer and had no free time to devote to customizing a website with open-source tools, I’d simply set up a Google account, start a Blogger journal, and then start uploading photos to my Picasa Web Album with the free Picasa desktop photo managing software. When you post photos to Blogger, they get added automatically to your Picasa Web account; uploading (and editing) photos with the Picasa desktop tool is a snap; and making prints to a variety of online photo services is also easy. Google will charge you a yearly fee for photo storage, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Google further integrates these two packages.
2. Wordpress with Flickr: If you currently have a Wordpress journal, there are plug-ins available that will integrate your Flickr photos into Wordpress. Sure, Flickr charges an annual fee for their Pro version, but it’s well worth it. If Flickr had a simple way of embedding your photo album into your own site, perhaps I’d reconsider my use of Gallery2. But it took so long to make prints and print products with Flickr, I never went back and followed through on using the service further.
3. Apple iPhoto 2008 with a .mac Account: My next computer will likely be an Apple, since I could run 3 different operation systems on one computer, plus I could still use all the current Windows software into which I’ve invested a great deal of money. Plus #2, the whole family could use one system that isn’t Vista. Plus #3, I’ve seen Steve Jobs’ demonstration of the new iLife 2008 software on the new iMacs. Huzzah! After the many late nights I spent learning DVD authoring software last year to get a family DVD out to relatives in time for the holidaze, watching Stevie demonstrate the photo and movie editing and sharing capabilities of the iLife 2008 was impressive. If I were to start from scratch, I’d go this route and rid myself of hours of pesky configuration, even though I masochistically enjoy that sort of thing. (Don’t get me started on how I once tried, and nearly succeeded, configuring MythTV in order to set-up a home PVR (personal video recorder) on an old home PC with Ubuntu Linux.*) Plus, it seems you’ll be able to use your personal domain name with your .mac account, so a long, pointless .mac web address would be a thing of the past.

However, my intent for our family site included the following ambitions:

1. Storage Control and Fees: Use only our existing and already-paid-for web space to store photos.
2. One Custom Site Design: Customize and integrate the journal and photo gallery with one overall sleek and straightforward web design.
3. Easy Photo Printing and Sharing: Allow family and friends to view our photos without any limits on downloading and where to print them, though we do recommend and encourage printing to Shutterfly. So, for example, if Auntie wants to download a photo of David to her desktop, great; if grandparents want to download and make prints at their local mart, go for it.

Since I’m a Tool Hound, I use both Picasa and Shutterfly desktop software to quickly edit and organize our photos (preferring Shutterfly Desktop at the current moment, especially if I’m making photo collages), but then I still upload the photos to the family website via the Gallery Remote tool (multiple OS versions).

I do not recommend Shutterfly’s photo web sharing; they make their money via prints and print products, so it seems the photo quality suffers for online viewing, supposedly so that you won’t go using the online photo somewhere else to make prints. Also see reason #2 above.

Photo Back-up: I also automatically back up all our family media to 1) a local network attached storage device, 2) Shutterfly, and 3) our webhosting account, all through Memeo back-up software. Auto backing up to Shutterfly makes it really easy for my wife to go online and make prints, since Shutterfly has unlimited photo storage, so all the photos I download from our camera to our main computer automatically end up there.

*Eventually, I just eBayed for cheap a low-profile HP running Vista Media Center. Good for now. Subject of another post.

With our years of experience dealing with the life cycle of NASA GRC websites, we’ll be keeping an eye on best practices for the average NASA GRC user to dynamically update and manage local Center websites, while keeping another eye on the forthcoming NASA public-face redesign that is scheduled to be implemented on November 30, 2007.

If our eyes become crossed as a result, we’ll likely rely on our third eye to help wade through the morass of information.