Internal USGS Access Only

The Outside Web

DNS names

Name Consistency (a rose by every other name..)

Search engines, exemplified by google, use the number of links to a site along with the ranking of the sites making the links to determine ranking. Being known by different hostnames can dilute this ranking.

Virtual Hosting

With virtual hosting several distinct sites, with different DNS hostnames, can reside on the same computer. For example, web sites http://cleanwater.gov/ and http://pubs.usgs.gov/ are actually on the same computer, and are serviced by the same web-server process, but have different DocumentRoots and different log files. Visit the NatWeb status page for a list of all active virtual hosts served by NatWeb.

This is a more elegant solution than forcing a distinct hostname into a sub-directory, such as is the case with "http://chesapeake.usgs.gov/chesbay/". (hosted on "md.water.usgs.gov".)

Copyright

This is a sticky arena right now, one to be very careful with.

• USGS Guidelines information on copyright.
• A couple of reference sites:
  • 10 Big Myths about copyright explained by Brad Templeton
  • Fair Use of Copyrighted Works a pamphlet published by CETUS (Consortium for Educational Technology for University Systems)

Site Rating

PICS: There is no single PICS standard rating, but a variety of rating schemes that may be used.

• The World Wide Web Consortium page describes the activity:
  "PICS is a cross-industry working group whose goal is to facilitate the development of technologies to give users of interactive media, such as the Internet, control over the kinds of material to which they and their children have access." The PICS standard defines the names of the META tags, but not the information inside them.
• There are two main rating systems, ICRA (produced from the merger of RSACi and ICRA) and SafeSurf.
• Because there are no universal rating standards it is uncertain what products or groups can make use of this information. MS Internet Explorer can make use of PICS information, and there are some PICS-aware web screening tools available for institutions and parents.

An example PICS rating (RSACi):
<META http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(pics-1.1
    "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" l gen true r (cz 1 lz 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1)
    "http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'

Linking to Commercial Sites

When you link public pages to commercial sites where there is any hint that the link could be endorsing a product or service, you need to have publicly available requirements which must be met before you will link to them. These criteria must be applied fairly, and links should be granted to everyone who meets the criteria.

With that, NMD developed criteria that must be met by private vendors in order for their sites to become eligible for a link from public pages. Below is a link to the page that deals with this, as well as a link to the criteria:

http://mapping.usgs.gov/partners/viewonline.html
http://mapping.usgs.gov/partners/viewcriteria.html

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"Mastering a Web Site" online course Created and maintained by Lorna Schmid and David Boldt. http://water.usgs.gov/usgs/training/webmaster/outside.html     Last modified: Thu Oct 23 08:33:22 Eastern Daylight Time 2003