The Eastern and Southern Africa

Regional Seismological

Working Group

Welcome to the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Seismological Working Group (ESARSWG) web page.

I think we should put a description of the working group here, why and when and how. I have reserved a page for a history/background so this text does not need to be all encompassing. Also, I think it's good to have this text rather short and use the Background/Member States/Activities pages for more info.

These are questions/topics/issues that I think need to be clarified for the web pages:

Please go through the material and pick out all the mistakes I made, wrong countries, erroneous info, spelling whatever. Just send me all complaints you have and I'll fix it. I don't quite like the word "Personnel" so I'll try to come up with a better one for that page, any suggestions? So, in no particular order:

• How do you want the 10 events on the map page sorted? Most recent events, most recently analysed events, any other?
• I don't like to put email adresses on the web anymore, there are too many spam programs sweeping up addresses these days. That's why I use the ugly email format name(dot)lastname(at)here(dot)there instead of name.lastname@here.there
• My future role in this little project needs to be discussed. For now, I can format the pages with the information you send me and make them run under my personal web page. If you like, we could for some time after that run the pages under a virtual server here, called eg. http://esarswg.geofys.uu.se I'm sure I can convince our webmaster to arrange that name. In such case, I would have to do the updating of the pages, which is OK for a while if you provide me with the info you want on the pages. In a longer time frame, the only sensible thing is of course to run the pages at one of your institutions. You should pick one which has good capacity and support, so you don't have to worry about the actual webserver. Also, you need to consider that wherever the pages are run, that is where there has to be a person which keep the pages updated.
• This is information which you can provide to your webserver administrators, this is what the pages require. The pages are static, i.e. they are not created/changed as the user request them. They do not use CGI-scripts, Javascript or any other dynamic stuff. To update the pages I have created a Python script which creates the map.html and the stations.html files. This script needs Python, version 1.5.2 or higher, GMT (the Generic Mapping Tool), version 3.4 or higher, and Ghostscript(gs), version 6.52 or higher. All of these programs are OpenSource, free of cost, and runs on most platforms. Python and Ghostscript are included in most Linux distributions. The script uses some functions which I am not sure how they would work under Windows, which I have not tested. However, the webpages do not need these resources once created, so as long as you can create the pages somewhere and then upload them to the server, you ar fine.
• Information that I need for the pages:
  • a) Station coordinates. These do not need to be very accurate if you have policies regarding who gets to know the location of the stations. In Uppsala we would never put the exact locations on the web just in case someone decideds to go and steal the equipment. Accuracy to 0.1 degree is enough since I only want the coordinates for the map. If you want the coordinates on the stations page as well, please tell me.
  • b) A list of events to plot on the map, whatever you want to put there. This also has bearing on the bulletin page, what do you have to put there? I suggest you put everything that you have already submitted to ISC, since that is public anyway. Please decide on a format for the bulletin (probably the same as you send to ISC). Finally, how many of the events in the bulletin should we put on the map? A certain period of time (1 year, 2 years, 5 years) or all of them?
  • c) Names for the Personnel pages, and affiliations and contact addresses. Have I forgot any functions that should be present on the Personnel page?
  • d) Information for the Member States page, including email address to contact persons.
  • e) List(s) of publications that are relevant to these pages, and pdf-files of the papers/reports/abstracts if you have them (please, no Word documents, convert to pdf).
  • f) Any and all other information that you think should go into these pages. They are your pages.

Cheers BjÃrn: bjorn (dot) lund (at) geo (dot)uu (dot) se