2013 Portal Discussion

Discuss Improvements to the SAS Portal Here

What is being discussed?

The SAS Portal serves as an information resource for small-angle scattering (SAXS and SANS). It is located on the web at http://smallangle.org/

This page has been set-up to provide a forum for discussion of ongoing development and ideas for additions. The homepage for the working group that maintains the portal is: http://www.cansas.org/wgwiki/index.php/Global_SAS_Portal_Working_Group and previous discussion is: http://www.smallangles.net/wgwiki/index.php/2012_Web_Discussion .

Agenda for Discussion

Items Remaining from Previous Discussion Page

ARR: The following points were left at the end of the discussion at the meeting in Uppsala and still need to be resolved:

• Current participants committed to do what needs to be done for having fully functional and exciting site by SAS 2012
• Current participants to act as editorial board for time being.

ARR: Are people willing to continue? Do they have enough time? Should any more people be recruited to help? There is probably an optimum size for a group.

• MID/LONG Term issues
  • Can we get funding from user groups to maintain (domain registration, commercial servers a la rackspace, etc)?

ARR: When will funding become an issue? Is there an estimate of (a) minimum and (b) desirable levels?

New Topics

• General

ARR: As the web site has now received some publicity - at SAS-2012 as well as in Synchrotron Radiation News and Neutron News, it is rather important that it evolves quickly and responds to suggestions from the wider community - it can otherwise acquire a reputation as not sufficiently useful that may be difficult to lose.

• Content

ARR: News items get old quickly. Is there a plan to solicit new items? Will old items be relegated to some archive? Keeping news up to date will help bring people back to the portal.

ARR: The ticker items look very dated after almost 6 months.

• Technical Issues

ARR: Some pages are not very conveniently formatted for some devices/browsers e.g. mobile devices with small screens. The software lists that used fixed width are a particular example.

ARR: As we know that the ticker is limited in characters with Internet Explorer, why do we not aim to keep below that limit? Some people may not always use Chrome, Mozilla, Opera etc.

ARR: Is it possible to set-up a semi-automatic system for submitting news items (perhaps just plain text up to some character limit) that could then after moderation automatically be added to a news item list.

ARR: The calendars would probably benefit from a simple means to provide specific information in a convenient format.

ARR: There are a number of Drupal updates available - perhaps these should be installed at some stage.