Re-design Phase 1 of the Portal

• Did a complete re-design of the page
• The page should now work fine in small as well as big screens. Page width: 1000px
• Solved JavaScript/Spry errors
• Reduced the loading time of the feeds drastically
• Updates the profile.css, screen.css
• Added feeds functionality so that posting or due dates would show only if the feeds have them.
• Fixed the Login menu
• Fixed the bookmarklet (which now goes inside the login bar on the top right ONLY when the user is logged in)
• Logout button loads the home page automatically
• Updated the .ico image to reflect the updated MSI-CIEC image in the address bar
• PLEASE report bugs using the "Report Bugs" feature.
• NOTE: The Portal DOES NOT work in IE (Internet Explorer) due to some IE-related Bug

All Open Grants.gov grants

http://www.msi-ciec.org now contains an RSS Feed of all the open grants currently available in Grants.gov. This feed is updated regularly. The feed is searchable by Agency name or the drop-down menu.

Few Fixes

• Fixed an "alignment" error of Global navigation in mac Firefox
• Added a new NSF Feed called "Program Announcements and Information" in addition 
• "Active Funding Opportunities" NSF Feed
• Deleted "Scivee" feed

Recent Changes / Modifcations - July 2008

• Fixed the "medium" bug which caused a fatal error
• Integrated iframes in the main content area so as to remove the "Go Back" feature which was not working properly
• "My tags" are not getting stuck any more
• Now one can filter the grants.gov rss feed results by Agency name using the live search bar
• Added "RSS" Icon to indicate to the user that he can click to review bugs and news updates in another RSS Reader
• Using "Spry - Adobe Framework" to read this blog though the News page

Recent Changes / Updates to MSI-CIEC Portal

List of some changes for the MSI-CIEC Portal (http://www.msi-ciec.org)

1. Decreased the load time of the page drastically by switching to the client-end Javascript code rather than using server-side PHP.
2. Better RSS feed readers
3. A grants.gov RSS feed.
4. Added functionality on Grants.gov feed:
1. Should be able to sort by clicking on the "title" and "agency name" headings.
2. Inserted paged views so the items can be browsed page-wise rather than scrolling up/down repeatedly. use the "First" "Last" "Next" "Prev" buttons for it
3. Increased the text size of the tags on the left and right navigational menus making them readable
5. Decoupled the loading of RSS feeds from the rest of the page, so page loads immediately, RSS feeds load when they are ready.
6. Other improvements on "interested" tags: see who else is tagging things as "interested" and what additional tags they use.
7. Added the ability to edit URLs click-tagged as "interesting" to add additional tags for better description.

MSI-CIEC Social Networking Portal Open Beta

The MSI-CIEC social networking portal (http://www.msi-ciec.org) is available for use. Use it to tag and bookmark URLs, create a professional profile of yourself for others to view, search NSF awards and TeraGrid allocations, and find other researchers with similar interests. For more information on the MSI-CIEC project, see the project Wiki: http://www.msi-ciec.org/eduwiki/index.php/Main_Page.

Finding or Connecting with different Researchers

You can search for any researcher in the NSF Awards database and find out the awards he/she has worked on with their peers. Correspondingly, you can also refine your search and find the specific result you are looking for using various access points such as the NSF directorate OCE, GEO etc., year of the award etc. and so on and so forth.