Today, I released the new Stratigraphy.net pages which are a real improvement in comparison to the old Snet homepage. The site structure is simpler and much easier to navigate. It now contains a data portal which allows searches on Snet data from our subprojects TaxonConcept and Agenames. I already wrote some comments on the technical details of the new data portal which is based on the OAI-PMH (Open Archives) protocol.
Interestingly, the Snet data page allows even more flexible queries than the original search pages of TaxonConcept or Agenames. For example authors of taxa or localities of stratigraphic units can be used in queries while TaxonConcept and Agenames only allow queries on the taxon name or name of a stratigraphic unit respectively.
Friday, July 4, 2008
The new Stratigraphy.net pages
Friday, April 18, 2008
A preview of the new Stratigraphy.net look
For quite a while we have been very unhappy with the old Snet homepage. The content is completely outdated and simply does no more reflect or promote our current activities. Further, after more than 5 years we found it was really time to reconsider the overall look of the homepage ;)
The old version was based on the CMS Contenido which is nice, but develloping modules for such a system e.g. a search interface allowing direct access to Snet data is a pain. Further, contenido now is popular enough to attract hackers which forces us webmasters to carefully watch the latest vulnerability reports, thus frequently perform security fix updates.
Therefore I decided to completely redesign the Snet homepage. The new version will be home brewn, slimmer but more informative. It will concentrate more on content, Snet data , services and news.
To keep maintenance costs as low as possible, Snet 2 will support major standard protocols to ingest content from various sources. For example we will use OAI-PMH to collect data from Agenames, Taxonconcept (and possibly other 3d party sources). It will also use RSS feeds to include news from all Snet projects as well as from this blog.
More datails on the new Snet architecture will be published here soon. By now I would like to invite those interesed to visit the first beta of Snet2 here:
http://www.stratigraphy.net/Snet2.