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The site started in 2000 as a "Hello World" statement; static and purely presentational. In time, its static content started to have some practical use:
Meanwhile, the web was changing; it became more stable after the browser wars, it drifted for some time wondering about syntactic purity and currently focuses on being an application-centric platform (and still evolving at that). Even its hardware changed; from big iron to distributed virtual machines coming and going by load and locality.
The COSMO webSite slowly drifted along. Some applications appeared in it:
The "BAD parts" is a presentation about those pages or server-side applications within the COSMO web site, that during these years
Some problems come not directly from the site but from what supports it; the system it runs on and the network connecting it to the world. Here are some:
Both the web and mail server run on the same system, a 3.6GHz single-core double-thread Xeon with 2GiB memory. This system was bought in 2005 as part of 6 support PCs for the main computer and remains as the one of the two still in service. It is still performing well and is (more than) adequate for the its light load, but it has some disadvantages:
The system is placed within the HNMS firewall, so all its limitations apply. The system cannot initiate a client connection for any protocol other than SMTP (mail distribution) and as a server is blocked for most protocols (other than (restricted) ssh and http)
This causes problems:
Even sources of presentational/archival content have dried up:
Some generic applications were not used (at all) and finally were removed (like the user forum). Others are going this way (like the bugzilla subdir).
Some more COSMO-specific applications haven't evolved beyond their initial demo-level; notably the per centre namelist comparison and the namelists web-based documentation
for others, even more specific, there are all kinds of usage patterns:
Some minor-importance defects are creeping in. They are not critical (and won't be for some time (or ever)), but they are a concern. Here are some:
Not unequivocally, it depends on the site's purpose.
If its intent is mainly to be a presence, let the word it is there and just present some links to external contact points, then it is not bad at all (or even good at it)
If it is to evolve into a central application server for customized, COSMO-centric and COSMO-specific application, it falls short as it is today.
With "COSMO-centric" I imply two things:
First, that we cannot antagonize dedicated general-purpose sites: probably we won't ever be a video-conference site; we won't fix a final meeting date in it's pages; maybe we won't even need a generic forum in it. Some of these are not worth the trouble, even for when we can make them, because a dedicated site will perform better; and COSMO is not a consortium about web-development.
Second, that there are applications that are so specific that you won't find them elsewhere. These can be useful, be centralized, and have a/the COSMO webSite as their user-friendly interface. Here are some ideas: