Activism, Space participation, SpaceCasts

The Space Show opens a website modernization campaign

David Livingston plans a major upgrade to the The Space Show website. An Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign is underway for the non-profit organization to support the modernization plan for the website. The site www.SupportTheSpaceshow.com offers additional details.

Here’s a video from David and Spencer Austin-Martin, who will lead the website revamp:

From the Indiegogo campaign page:

To bring The Space Show into the modern age we first have to acknowledge its current limitations. Built in the early 2000s, the current Space Show website offers very limited search capabilities that involve a two step process of a key word search on a static page followed by manually looking up the show via a chronological search function. Furthermore, only about 1/3 of the shows have key words none which are not a searchable part of our database. The current platform is also ill suited for the modern internet age where users are accessing the site from many different kinds devices including smartphones and tablets.

Our plan is to move The Space Show onto Drupal, an advanced Content Management System used by major media, businesses and institutions from the Economist and SpaceX to NASA and many major universities. Leveraging the power of Drupal, The Space Show will become sustainable, scalable, and upgradable. Listeners will also benefit from a responsive layout that will display properly on smart phones, tablets, PCs, and laptops regardless of the operating system. Behind the scenes there will be search engine optimization and users will benefit from a constantly updated and fresh content display which will enable fully searchable access to The Space Show’s treasury of information.

Another major benefit of the modernization program is the enhanced search functionality. Whereas searches and key words on the old site were cumbersome, often involving several steps on different pages, the new site will include multifaceted searches including date, topic, guest, and keywords with sub-sorting availability. Thousands of key words that were not linked to the original database on the old site are now integrated and associated with their respective shows meaning listeners will have faster, more thorough, and easier access to the content they want.
I provided a testimonial in support of the campaign. The Space Show holds a tremendous storehouse of information about a key period in space development. Please help them reach their goal so this great resource can be properly accessed by space enthusiasts, students, and historians.