Welcome to Hot Items!

This site was created to facilitate the sharing of information and interesting stories among NOAA Research labs, program offices and headquarters. Here, you can view those stories and enter work-related stories of your own.

Viewing stories
Rotating lab names
Other Hot Items web sites
Entering stories

Make Hot Items your Netscape Mail Startup page

Viewing Stories on Hot Items

On the Hot Items homepage, you will see rows of lab/office acronyms. Under each acronym is a list of headlines relating to that particular lab/office. This "summary page" is a listing of all OAR stories that are available for viewing. Each headline can be clicked and will take you to another page where you can read the details of the story.

On the "story detail" page, you will find the body of the story, contact information, an assortment of relevant details, and a printer-friendly version of the story.

The stories change continuously and so are directly visible on the Hot Items homepage only for a certain period of time. After this time has passed, the stories are placed in the archive.

If you no longer see a story among the Hot Items headlines, click the "Archive" link at the top right corner of the screen to access the archives. There, you can do a search for the story you need.

The lab/office acronym or the Home graphic (blue circle with house) can be clicked and will take you to that lab/office's own web site.

Rotating lab names

The placement of each lab/office on the page is not static. Once a day, all labs/offices and their related headlines shift one panel to the right. So each new day will reveal a different lab/office occupying the first panel on the page.

To help you find a particular lab/office, use the "Lab Quick Find" menu at the top right of the screen. Select a lab/office from the drop down menu and the screen will automatically jump to the row containing that lab/office. In the "Lab Quick Find", listings are alphabetical and do not rotate.

Other Hot Items Web Sites

There are actually multiple Hot Items web sites.

1. The "lab-level" Hot Items web site is a site that only displays stories entered by one particular lab. The site is only visible and accessible to employees of that particular lab. Each lab has its own web site, but while there are many lab-level sites, you are able to only look at your lab's site.
2. The "OAR-level" Hot Items web site is a site that displays stories from any OAR lab or office. It is viewable by all OAR employees. Only specially authorized users can publish stories to the OAR-level site. These stories can be brand new stories or stories that originally appeared on any lab-level site. There is only one OAR-level web site. You are currently viewing OAR's Hot Items site.

Entering Stories into Hot Items

Stories that appear on this site are either new stories entered directly onto this site, or stories that were first published on any lab-level Hot Items site and then "pushed" from the lab-level site onto the OAR-level site.

To enter a story or to push a story from one of the lab-level Hot Items sites to this site, you need a username and password to log into the administration area. These usernames must have special permissions programmed into it and is not available to most employees. (If you do not qualify for these special logins, consider obtaining a lab-level username which will allow you to post stories to your lab's Hot Items site rather than the OAR Hot Items site.)

Once in the admin area of this site, you can add or push a story and perform various administrative tasks relating to the story. Further Help screens are available in the admin area.

To access the admin area, click the "Admin login" link located near the bottom of the Hot Items homepage, close to the blue NOAA logo.