Slicer3:Web Presence

Overview

Infrastructure work to support a uniform Slicer web presence. Work building on AHM 2006 Project Slicer3 Web Presence

Requirements:

• counting number of downloads of Slicer binaries
• record user information as they agree to abide by the Slicer license agreement
• integrated download page that will provide links to binary Slicer packages, for nightly builds, developer snapshots, and official releases

Counting Downloads

We need the ability to report number of unique Slicer binaries downloaded per month and per grant year, per release version, as well as aggregate numbers. Needed for grant reporting. The old method involved examining the flat files written as output from the Slicer license agreement web form and counting numbers of discrete entries by hand.

Current page: http://websrv.bwh.harvard.edu/usage/na-mic-usage/

Do we need to parse the apache download logs directly or use multiple configuration files for Webalizer?

Inspiration page: SimTK download statistics and SimTK geography of use.

Publications data base download page implemented at http://www.na-mic.org/Special:Publications Download statistics.

From Ron 12 Sept 2007:

  Don't over report! (missing 1% is okay)
  No duplictae downloads.
  Disclose the method by which we are counting (report to NIH).

License Agreement

We need to record some basic information from users so we have a record of their agreeing to the Slicer license agreement. Needed for grant reporting in conjunction with download counting.

Current page: [1]

The original license form was written as an HTML form that submitted data to a perl script that would verify the form entries and then write the user information to a series of flat files, one per month.

The move to use Wiki2Web for the Slicer web pages complicates the issue, as the form has to be translated into a MediaWiki page that will translate to the final web page and still work. From Nicole 3 Aug 2007:

 Marianna and I were working on the Slicer License form this afternoon, trying to get it working within the wiki to web framework, and  
 we've hit a major roadblock.
 Mediawiki isn't rendering the html form tag, it's printing it out as text.
 From looking at
 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Inputbox
 it seems like we could install an extension to get certain pre-defined input boxes, but
 a) we can't get the example to work (following the installation instructions)
 b) once we get the example to work, a new extension will have to be written in PHP to support the license form.

Download Page

Current page: http://www.na-mic.org/Slicer/Download/

Needs to be integrated into the Wiki2Web framework in such a way that supports automatic uploads from nightly builds, developer snapshot uploads, as well as automatic downloads of Windows prebuilt binary sub-packages during the building of Slicer.

From Andy 4 Jun 2007:

 You could also create a MediaWiki extension for downloading files.
 Then you can use W2W to write text around the page, but use the extension to give you the list of files.

From Ron 12 Sept 2007:

 Try progressive drop down menus, that will navigate you to the proper slicer version that you wish 
 (ie latest release for your platform, or a release from a specific date)
 Goal: www.slicer.org/Download, click through the license, then see the drop down menus
 Major requirement: has to be very easy to use, no barriers for first time users.
 Needs to have same look and feel as the rest of the slicer.org pages

Team Members

• Nicole Aucoin
• Zack Galbreath
• SPL system administrators