
California Health and Human Services Open Data Portal - ruffrey
https://data.chhs.ca.gov
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richardknop
The large popup window which shows up when I navigated to the website is quite
intrusive. I would suggest making this more user friendly.

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gkilmain
Its a government website which provides data to you. They've moved to a new
platform and they're asking you to provide a bit of information so that they
can improve their platform which in turn should improve the developer
experience. Are you fucking kidding me? More user friendly? How about they
don't ask anything, guess at what the developer wants, so that a few years
from now you can come back and comment how their data portal is shit.

~~~
swivelmaster
There are other, less obnoxious ways to ask for feedback.

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gkilmain
Their intent is purely to improve the developer experience.

> There are other, less obnoxious ways to ask for feedback

Yes I agree but I don't think that applies to this specific use case.

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danso
Just the other week I stumbled on the CDPH's excellent data site when trying
to find the old page they had for immunization data. Besides making a data
portal where datasets are easier to find, I feel it's important to give the
CDPH a shout-out for good-practices when it comes to overhauling their
websites.

So this was a file I was trying to access which worked on the CDPH's old site:

[http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/Documents/2016-17_C...](http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/Documents/2016-17_CA_KindergartenSummaryReport.pdf)

If you visit that site, you get this excellent 404 page, screenshotted below:
[http://imgur.com/a/7z7xJ](http://imgur.com/a/7z7xJ)

Maybe I've run into too many poorly-maintained government (and non-gov)
websites, but here's why the 404-page impressed me.

1\. Written for laypersons ("May we assist you in locating information during
our transition?")

2\. Contains contextual information about why the 404 happened ("Our most
popular content is moving from our former site which was renamed to
[https://archive.cdph.ca.gov](https://archive.cdph.ca.gov) on May 1, 2017.")

3\. Contains bullet point tips on how to find that old URL ("Try replacing the
'cdph.ca.gov' or 'www.cdph.ca.gov' portion of the URL with
'archive.cdph.ca.gov' in your web browsers address bar." and "Please use our
search on [https://cdph.ca.gov](https://cdph.ca.gov) using the topic of
interest.")

In other words, the old file I was trying to find can be found in the archive
domain:

[http://archive.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/Documents/2016-...](http://archive.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/Documents/2016-17_CA_KindergartenSummaryReport.pdf)

Just the fact that they archived their old site so that the near-decade of
URLs accumulated are exactly mirrored onto a subdomain is an impressive amount
of planning and courtesy in itself. But to have a 404 page _at all_ ,
nevermind a helpful one, is a pleasant surprise when it seems the status quo
is to do an auto-redirect that confuses the hell out of laypersons and
technical-skilled folks alike.

FWIW, the immunization data used to be provided in a set of Excel
spreadsheets, one URL for each year. It was a fun web-scraping/collating
exercise, but now the data portal has it in convenient, tidy (as in, "tidy
data") CSV:

[https://data.chhs.ca.gov/dataset/school-immunizations-in-
kin...](https://data.chhs.ca.gov/dataset/school-immunizations-in-kindergarten-
by-academic-year/resource/1ddb239e-9014-4340-b356-2fc3462630ec)

~~~
DrScump
This is very project-specific with respect to CA.gov sites. (My sister
contracted on a number of projects and told me horror stories).

One example is that they completely replaced their legislation and laws search
engine (texts of codes) but _left the non-functional deprecated site in place
for months_. An obscure reference link to the new site was added in small text
(the smallest font used). The old page appeared to "work" but always returned
"No results found."

I would have preferred an ugly but obvious instruction, even a big red 'X'
with maybe <h1><font color=red>Go HERE, dummy!</font></h1>

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Flammy
In case anyone was curious, this data portal is built using a service/company
called Socrata which offers data portals and related services for cities,
states, federal departments, etc.

You can browse some of their data sources here:
[https://www.opendatanetwork.com/](https://www.opendatanetwork.com/)

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dpkonofa
Your comment is completely incorrect. This is a platform called OpenGov that
uses the open source CKAN data portal as its base. They offer additional
visualizations and hosting support on top of the open source offering, but
this is definitely __not __Socrata.

