2012 CSSS Presentations Available – Really

Okay, five days later DHS NPPD has finally gotten the dead link problem taken care of on the 2012 Chemical Sector Security Summit page, but they sure went around the block to do it.

The first thing that they did was to take the links to the presentations off of the CSSS page and provide a link to another page, the 2012 Chemical Sector Security Summit Presentations page. They also modified the list of presentations from the earlier version of the page and made it more difficult to read by centering the list of presenters vertically next to the subject title when there were multiple presentations under the same heading. Okay, that sounds confusing; just look at the page and you’ll figure out what I was trying to say.

The list of presentations on the second page is not in the same order or organized in the same manner as on the front page. No real big problem here, but it does make it more difficult to find a particular presentation to look at. Okay, it is only 18 presentations so it really isn’t that big a deal.

There are active links on the presentations page, but they don’t actually take you to the presentations. Click on any of the links provided and it takes you to a separate page with a link to that particular presentation. That page provides a little bit of information about the presentation, the most valuable of which is the file size. There is a link to that presentation that does actually go to the presentation.

Okay, it’s not like they were cutting down trees to put these 18 extra web pages up. But it did take some extra site design time and wastes some space on a server that is consuming some level of additional power to maintain the extra pages. Oh yes, it does take some additional time for the reader to click through, but who cares about them. Not apparently anyone at DHS.

Have I said yet that I think the new DHS web site design sucks? The attentive reader may have noticed that I am less than thrilled that DHS has lowered its standards to those of DOT.

One last complaint: they are still only PowerPoint® presentations. For those of us who cannot afford a yearly junket to Washington to attend the CSSS, this is the only real source of information we have from this important information sharing session. Ignoring for the moment muckrakers like me, the 600 person attendance limit shuts out most of the CFATS covered facilities from attending this function. Then limiting the information shared to these slide presentations is ludicrous. At the very least there should be an audio file so we can hear the presenters’ explanation of the slides. What we really should have is a web cast of these presentations.

Okay, enough complaining. I’ll cover some of the presentations in more detail in upcoming blogs.