Poster PDF
Authors
Katarina Maria Younkin — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Rolanda Jundt — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Lynne R Roeder — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Sherman Beus — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Category
Infrastructure & Outreach
Description
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program developed a website in 1994 to support the science and infrastructure communication needs of the program. With an estimated 10,000 pages on servers maintained at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the ARM website provides climate change information and data to scientists, government officials, university researchers, and the public, as well as ARM participants. As a scientific user facility, the ARM Climate Research Facility provides web-based services, such as the data archive, publications database, research highlights, field campaign system, and wiki environments. On October 1, the ARM science component was merged with another DOE science program. This programmatic development required a redesign of the ARM website to reflect the changes in program structure, while also presenting an opportunity to change the way the site is managed. More than half of the site was maintained by an unconnected series of custom, database-driven content systems. Until the summer of 2008, news and program information were maintained the old-fashioned way—static HTML. In 2008, WordPress was installed to build a new database with RSS (really simple syndication) feed capability. Through the News Center, the custom systems developed for research highlights and publications were then connected, and RSS feeds could be offered to users. With a redesign underway, we moved the rest of the static HTML pages into WordPress. Now, through several interfaces of web forms, all content is accessible to all the ARM writers and editors, allowing them to update web pages without sending their content to web programmers. This allows the web application developers and programmers to better control the website HTML code, scripting, and cascading style sheets.
