Web Site Work Introduction

Background

The NRIAI staff station with ARS and Texas A&M Extension started building three agency websites in 1996, all three still maintained today. No additional sites were started until July 2003.

• The CARE site to make publicly available the NRCS CARE model and 20,000 CARE crop budgets built for the EQIP, SWAT, and HUMUS modeling efforts at Blackland.
• The NRIAI website
• The NRCS Data and Analysis site for Economic and Watershed Planning materials.

In July 2003; two student interns were hired (classified as GS-2 Clerks) to speed up the conversion of these existing three sites into the NRCS webfarm. One week later, the Technical Service Providers Not-To-Exceed team found no other option for distributing the NTE rates to the public in five weeks except to build the website at the NRIAI site in Temple. Both of the new hires had some web-database experience, so we started down this road.

Staff

• David Buland, Economist, NRIAI stationed at Temple since 1995. David’s primary job is to provide Economic support to NRCS state offices, economic assistance to NHQ as required, NRCS liaison to the AAEA Economics, Statistics and Information Resources Committee, and to the ASFMRA Technology committee. To complete these primary duties, David started the NRCS (Economics) Data and Analysis site and Costs and Returns site in 1996. Given these skills, he was given the collateral duty of being the NRIAI webmaster in 1998. With the need for a Benefit/Costs Analysis to accompany each of the Rules for the 2002 Farm Bill, David was on the Benefit/Cost Teams for the EQIP, TSP, and CSP Program Rules. After completing the TSP Benefit/Cost analysis in November, 2002, ; the same team was called back together in May, 2003, to determine TSP Not-To-Exceed Rates for FY03.
  
• Don Abel, Student Intern (GS-2 Clerk), hired in July 2003. Don is an Information Systems major at the University of Mary Hardin Baylor, graduating in May 2004. He has eight years work experience with E.R. Carpenter prior to returning to school. Don was recently recognized as the top graduating senior in his degree program. As a graduating senior, his student appointment with NRCS ends on April 30. After graduation, Don would be very interested in another job with NRCS.
  
• Nathanial Hollander, Student Intern (GS-2 Clerk) hired in July 2003. I was sorry to have to terminate him on December 10, happy to see him receive his degree in Network Security on December 11 from UMHB, and to obtain a job with the NRCS Texas staff as a GS-9 Computer Specialist on December 13. He had eight years in the Navy, doing IT work for the later years, prior to returning to school. He is still with NRCS Texas.
  
• Ramona Taylor, Student Intern / Earthteam Volunteer. Ramona is a Graphics Arts Junior at UMHB, with seven years school district experience prior to returning to school. Starting in January 2004, she has been converting the Economics and CARE sites, and submitted the www.economics.nrcs.usda.gov site for L&F and 508 accessibility reviews to the NRCS website team last month. Her internship will be up in May.

Equipment

The websites are produced on four machines, David’s FY-02 CCE-purchased Dell Latitude P-III with XP Professional, a 1998 Gateway P-II zeos.brc.tamus.edu, a July, 2003 $900 Dell 2.0Ghz/512K P-IV hawk.brc.tamus.edu, and a July, 2003 Dell PowerEdge 1600SC 2.0GHz/512K 533MHz FSB Xeon for $2,068.00 plus shipping, http://xeon2.brc.tamus.edu.
The last three machines were loaded with Windows Server 2000 and Office XP.
The earlier Economics, NRIAI, and CARE websites have been hosted in sub-directories on a Texas A&M extension machine, http://waterhome.brc.tamus.edu

We have also picked up two shelves of IT books. This reference material has proved invaluable.

Technology

he software used for these efforts were Server 2000, Access 2002, FrontPage 2002, and PageScreamer. The technologies were simple .html and .ASP pages, with minimal usage of Java and Basic script.

This is a level of technologies a couple of years below that used at ITC with MS SQL Server databases, more complex web editing programs, and .NET. There is a conflict in the database platforms; ITC does not allow MS Access databases on the webfarm for security reasons.

There were three reasons for using the older technologies:

• These older technologies, programs, and skills are available at any NRCS state office, so the basic Institute function of developing and testing useful technologies for local NRCS usage is maintained.
• Using MS Access as the back-end allows two-way development of the database and calculations with NRCS state and NHQ staff. There was no need to import and export between Access and SQL Server.
• So that there are at least two staff members who could rebuild/replace any page on the websites.

Future of this website work

With the proposed reorganization of NRCS that will eliminate NRIAI; since July, there has been a evolving contingently plan to move all the websites to alternative location within six weeks of receiving the designated reassignment/ relocation of the staff. Keeping this short-term exit contingency available for nine months has made this development work more difficult.

Unless other resources developed (like a budget for NRIAI), David Buland will be the only NRIAI staff member left in Temple by May 1.

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