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Why Projects Appear Under About: Navigation and Citation

Why project lists sat under About as well as under /projects: navigation, citation practice, and how an About listing differs from the engineering index.

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A weather site that also wrote PHP helpers had two honest places to list them. /projects is an engineering index: graphs, logs, banners, tags, checks. About is identity: who runs the station, what software it uses, and which named helpers belong to this site rather than to the wider Cumulus forum. The historical TNET URL /aboutus/projects is the information-architecture page for that split.

The dotted twin /aboutus.projects is the narrative About listing. The Cumulus-host /projects hub is the research map of file problems. This slash URL is the navigation and citation problem: why both menus existed, how a later reader should cite them, and how not to collapse one into the other.

Modern TNET Weather does not restore a project-submission form and does not rehost the historical packages.

Historical context

PHP CMSs of the period often built a page tree from a menu named About, with children for policy, memberships, website info, software, and projects. The same hostname also exposed /projects as a public catalog because forum posts and the Cumulus Wiki TNET Cumulus Scripts page (last checked 13 August 2026) cited project names as destinations. Operators arriving from a wiki wanted the catalog. Operators arriving from a footer “About this site” wanted a short, credited list that answered “what did this station publish besides weather?”

Those are different questions. Mixing them produces either an About page that is secretly a download cabinet, or a projects hub that is secretly a biography.

The login alias /aboutus/projects&action=login gated who could add a row. Access control is that article. Information architecture is this one.

Two indexes, two jobs

Treat the URLs as a small library, not as aliases.

| URL | Job | Cite it when | |---|---|---| | /aboutus/projects (this page) | How About and Projects menus relate; how to cite | You need the map of indexes | | /aboutus.projects | About-section narrative: this site’s credited helpers as identity | You are describing the station as a publisher | | /projects on this host | Engineering map of Cumulus file problems | You need the problem class (realtime log, banner, WAP) | | /projects/… children | Deep note on one helper | You are implementing or researching that helper | | /projects on tnetweather.com | Packaging and credits across stacks | You need release-discipline language, not the Cumulus map |

A forum sentence that says “see TNET projects” is incomplete. Name the host and the path. The Cumulus subdomain /projects is not the main-host packaging essay, and neither is an About child.

Navigation: where a visitor should have landed

From a station footer. “About” is the right parent. The visitor is asking who you are. A short project list under About should name the helpers this site actually ran or authored, with a license line, and should link out to /projects for the engineering map. It should not duplicate every child article.

From a wiki or forum how-to. /projects is the right parent. The visitor is asking which file contract a named script consumed. Sending that person through cookie policy and memberships first is a menu accident.

From a search engine. Dotted and slash twins both exist in the inventory (/aboutus.projects and /aboutus/projects). They are preserved as distinct addresses. Cite the one whose angle matches the sentence you are writing. Do not 301 them together in prose by copying the same article to both files.

From a login URL. action=login on an About child was an editor entry, not a public catalog. Archive copies of those URLs are now articles about sessions and access control. They are not a sign-in screen.

A practical test: if removing the weather observations would still leave a useful page, you are in About (identity, credits, policy). If removing the operator’s name would still leave a useful page, you are in /projects (file problems). This URL exists because real sites needed both.

Citation practice

Historical backlinks are messy. They point at About, at /projects, at child scripts, and at truncated query strings. A later researcher should record:

  1. Exact path and host. cumulus.tnetweather.com/aboutus/projects is not tnetweather.com/projects.
  2. What the citing page needed. A credit line (“uses the GD banner”) belongs with About. A field-list warning belongs with the child engineering article.
  3. Whether a package is claimed. About listings that say “our projects” are identity claims. The /projects map explicitly refuses to be a ZIP cabinet. Do not cite the map as a download source.
  4. Login aliases as artifacts. A backlink to &action=login documents that the CMS had an editor session on that node. It does not document that accounts still exist.

When the Cumulus Wiki lists TNET script names, the honest modern citation is the named child URL plus the projects map for context. The About listing is supporting evidence that the hostname presented those names as part of site identity.

What not to put under About/projects

Full engineering essays. Axis units, cron intervals, and GD font paths belong on child project URLs. About should not become a second wiki.

Unverified binaries. A listing is a name, a one-line problem statement, and a license if known. It is not a file mirror. The downloads catalog records why binaries stay offline.

Every experiment. Cookie-notice tests, METAR toys, and one-off parsers can live on the engineering map without appearing in the About identity list. About is a curated credits page. /projects is a research map. Curation is the difference.

Software choice or tag glossaries. Those have their own About children (software choice, tag glossary). Projects under About are named helpers, not the station program itself.

Practical checklist for operators preserving a site

  1. Keep an About-level list of helpers this site credits, with license and a link to the deep article.
  2. Keep /projects as the problem index; do not paste it into About.
  3. Use distinct titles so search results do not look like duplicates.
  4. Gate additions to the About list (spam and fake downloads are the login article’s subject).
  5. When you cite yourself, use the URL that matches the sentence: identity versus engineering.
  6. When you migrate, preserve both paths if both collected backlinks. Merging them silently breaks other people’s footnotes.

Modern relevance

Documentation sites still split “about the project” from “the repo index.” The weather-software case is the same split with worse URL punctuation. TNET preserves both addresses so a footnote from 2011 still lands on a page that explains the kind of list it was.

Grouping records by what they are—identity metadata versus an engineering file contract—is provenance work. TNET’s public note on source identity for weather records used in connection research is data sources, quality controls, and methodology. How observed and derived information are labeled is conceptual on how the service works. The Cumulus hub is the category entry for both the About cluster and the projects map.

Sources