Advanced Photon Source

The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory is the largest scientific user facility in the U.S., so its website has domestic and international users, and supports a very specialized audience. As Webmaster, my job is to transform a very large, decentralized, and static website into one that is dynamic, accessible, maintainable, and well-designed. Like any site, this is an ongoing and organic process. After cutting the file count in half, (down from over 500,000 pages) in December 2007 I launched a redesign of the home page and the site’s major sections. Since we are not yet using a true web CMS, I built several custom solutions using a combination of Oracle Enterprise Content Management, Ajax (with jQuery+XML) and PHP.

Highlights:

• Interactive Beamlines Map built primarily in jQuery with XML backend and PHP
• Calendar utilizes RSS as storage and hcalendar microformats
• Status page aggregates and resizes images with ImageMagick