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.

My work on the ICNS conference continues in the communications and publications for 2009. This poster was designed to reflect the netcentric integration among the communications, navigation and surveilliance elements that occur during an aircraft’s full travel path, from take-off to landing. Accompanying this design was an update to the ICNS Conference website graphic theme.

• Old Set-up: Eudora, POP, Dreamhost webmail (Squirrelmail)
• New Set-up: Thunderbird, IMAP, Google webmail (Gmail)

See resources below for further explanation, especially of acronyms.

Issues Solved, Benefits

1. Great Mail Syncing with IMAP: I’d been checking email from up to four places (work, home, phone, travel) via a combination of POP (via Eudora, no longer being supported, from what I saw) and IMAP (via webmail and Palm smartphone). IMAP syncs (and stores) all your mail on the mail server, so that if I read email in one location, all other locations know what I did. However, rather than just using one webmail account, I needed Thunderbird to archive/save all my old POP mail from Eudora (saved since 1997, across two computers!), and to manage forthcoming archives, in case I ever wanted to avoid exceeding Gmail’s storage limit (currently at 6 GB and counting) or to move my mail elsewhere.
2. Serious Spam Filtering: Gmail has the best spam filtering I’ve ever seen! Virtually all spam gets sent to their spam filter! This means that I was able to resuscitate two old email addresses at my JoeBanks.com domain that had been made unusable due to spam! (Nearly 500 spam mails a week!) As a result, I was able to receive an old friend’s recent wedding invitation notice that otherwise would have bounced or never been properly received.
3. Email at My Own Domain: Just convenient. Plus, if you wanted to use Gmail’s features, why would you bother having two email addresses and corresponding accounts, for example, a Gmail account (such as yourname@gmail.com) and your domain’s email account (such as PappaBear@joebanks.com). Or having to forward all mail from your domain account to your Gmail acount. Google Apps combined all this nicely.
4. Google Tools: Can use Gmail’s online applications, such as Docs and Calendar, although I’ll be on the lookout to see how Microsoft’s online tools compete. However, I’d also like to be able to use Google’s online RSS feed reader (simply called “Reader”) via logging in with my domain’s Gmail account, rather than using a separate Google account.
5. Free, Enough Storage, Remote Back-up, Access Previous Archives: Currently, my 11 years of email that I archived on my home computer does not even equal Gmail’s current free storage limit of 6 GB. So starting fresh with Gmail was an easy decision from this point on. Plus, having mail always on their server means, I know I’ll always have a remote back-up of my email, and I can use Gmail’s search tools (online) to find that freelance contact’s or relative’s email from way back. And my 11 years of archives remain usable locally on my computer through an import from Eudora into Thunderbird.
6. Filtering, Labeling: I like Gmail’s process of how email should be labeled as it comes in and automatically sent to folders based on the sender or subject criteria (for Gmail, a label is essentially the same as a folder, you just have to set up a filter to label and “folderize” it as it comes in). Every one of my clients, friends, relatives or specific mail list email address has been assigned a filter and label (done via Gmail’s web interface); as mail comes in, it arrives in the Inbox AND gets filtered by having a label assigned to it. At some point, as mail in the Inbox gets too large, I hit the “archive” button online for all or selected message(s), and mail goes out of the Inbox (essentially, the “Inbox” label is removed) and then properly labeled mail remains in its folder (e.g., Banks-Sheryl). And my Inbox stays tidy! Any unlabeled mail goes to their all inclusive “All” folder.
7. Free, Cross-Compatible: Like I said, Gmail and Thunderbird are both free and work on Windows, Apple and Linux. Done, since I work on all three platforms, for fun and profit.

Resources & Steps

1. What is IMAP?
2. Gmail, for just getting a Google account for email and to try out their online applications, or skip to next step:
3. Google Apps, for setting up your domain to use Gmail and other apps.
4. Thunderbird
5. Thunderbird Settings for Gmail
   • Additional Recommended Thunderbird Settings for Gmail (and recommended IMAP settings overall for Gmail
6. Import old POP email on your computer into Thunderbird. It stays local, but at least it’s not lost! Importing from another IMAP account can also be done with Gmail.
7. Configure other email clients

Time Invested: 6-8 hours over 2-3 days. And that included time to import all my email and re-set-up about 30 email address aliases at two domains.

Time & Life Savings: 2-3 hours a week (about 20 minutes a day). Less time diddling with the smartphone and even less time spent in front of the home computer! And less of a chance that I’ll waste time at work!

Would Like

• To be able to sync not only Google’s calendar with my Palm or future smartphone (iPhone? Google phone?) calendar, but my other Palm data (tasks, contacts, memos), via a trusted, reliable (and free?) method.

Final Tip: I find it best to have two email accounts for each domain. For example, for both my personal email and freelance email domains, I have two email accounts and corresponding addresses: one for personal email and the other for shopping and mail lists. Therefore, when I check email from my smartphone, I can just check the personal mail and ignore the other, which gets the bulk of emails.

This is another reason why I use Thunderbird, because it ties together all my email accounts into one view. If I were on travel and needed to use Gmail’s webmail, I would have to log into 4 different webmail accounts to check all my mail, at least by using the free version. However, that’s not usually the case, since I check all my mail on my smartphone (using Snappermail), checking all accounts at once or individually, as needed.

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.