Work
NASA Earth Observatory
NASA Earth Observatory
Web platform work for NASA Earth science publishing — editorial workflows, imagery, and the public site. The site is live. Audience scale during that period is noted below; it is not a traffic result claimed for this work.
Impact & evidence
~1.5 million monthly visitors during this work
Historical platform scale, not traffic growth attributed to Karl or a current audience figure.
On this page
Problem
- Science publishing needs maintainable workflows for editorial content and large imagery.
- A large public audience makes performance, usability, and search discoverability part of the same job as the CMS.
Decisions
- Modernize the web platform and reusable publishing components on Laravel and MySQL.
- Treat content presentation and large imagery as engineering work, not only editorial production.
- Address performance, user experience, and search discoverability in the same development path.
Evidence
- Monthly visitors during this work (historical platform scale)
- ~1.5M
Outcome
- A public Earth science publishing platform. The live site is the artifact.
- Work covered editorial workflows, imagery, and the public pages. This page does not publish performance or traffic-change metrics.
- About 1.5 million monthly visitors during that work describes the scale of the platform in that period, not a current figure and not a result attributed to this project.
Team & contribution
- Contribution
- Technical leadership and web development
- Team & partners
- Engineering and editorial partners at NASA Goddard
- What I improved
- Publishing workflows and recurring web-platform maintenance.
- Key decision
- Improve reusable publishing capabilities alongside performance and usability.
NASA Earth Observatory is a public Earth science publishing site. The work sat between editorial needs and web engineering: reusable publishing capabilities, content and imagery presentation, and a platform that could be maintained as those needs changed.
The site is public. Open it.
Publishing and the public website
Application work covered the people publishing the material and the people reading it. Large imagery and long-running publishing workflows were part of the same job as the public pages. A change that helped an editor still had to hold up for a substantial audience.
Performance, user experience, and search discoverability were in that path. They are listed as scope of the work, not as measured before/after results.
Scale of the platform
The platform served approximately 1.5 million monthly visitors during that work. That figure is the scale of the site in that period, not a current traffic claim and not a growth metric for this project.
Laravel and MySQL were the application stack. This page does not describe unpublished internals of the publishing pipeline.