Announcements about The BirdSpotter
I’ve just posted up the first screen shots on the domain home page to show you that there really is some development going on. The work to date has relied heavily on the built in scaffolding and everything is using the generic Cake styling.
Just a taster of what’s to come.
Posted in Development.
This development originally started life as a project on sourceforge.net. You can still find the orginal site and some requirements details over on birdmaster.sourceforge.net. I started that in March 2003 and have done next to nothing with it; but that was back in the days before cloud computing and development frameworks become popular.
The original project was to be called “Birdmaster”; however that wasn’t available as a domain when I decided to move the project to the cloud. Names like “twitcher” and “birder” are also take as domains so “Birdspotter” it has to be. There’s more of a drive to get the development done now and tools like CakePHP certainly make the development process a lot faster.
Posted in Development.
Two items to add to the features list for future developments.
First is the ability to create ‘Trip Lists’. Much birding is done on an organized trip to this that or the other location. Whilst the basic application will allow sightings to be recorded by site this feature will allow another level of organization. You’ll be able to specify the trip date and details like locations and weather conditions. How about the ability to link in other users sightings to produce an all encompassing trip list?
Second is aliases. These are local names for bird species that will improve searching the very long bird species list for a particular bird. I’m not sure how this will work in practise; but something will have to be developed to help users easily locate the bird they’ve seen.
Posted in Development, features, sightings.
Saw a gorgeous Grey Wagtail (Motacilla cinerea) up on Droumgariffe this morning.
Posted in sightings.
Just a quick word on the blog theme. I did have a nice birdie theme that had a picture of Puffins on a rock. Very topical. However the theme had some nasty bugs and so I’ve had to resort to using one of the Wordpress supplied themes which works; but looks a bit dull ( “a bit?” I hear you say).
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An update on the theme. I’m now using the Carrington theme from Crowd Favorite. Still not a birdie theme; but is look reasonable and it works, which is the main thing.
Posted in Birdspotter Blog.
Progress has already been made in the initial development of Birdspotter.org. I’m using the CakePHP development framework which allows for rapid prototyping and transformation from a database design to working code.
To date I have working code for adding, updating and deleting:
The only thing that’s missing (only?) is a user registration facility. The authorization feature is working; but I’ve yet to fully implement it. Once this and the registration facility is completed I’ll have something to release.
Posted in Development.
This is a short discussion of the features that I wanted from a Birding application - somewhere to record my bird sightings and information about my birding trips and twitches. Even though I’d tried a few applications they never seemed to tick all the boxes. Mind you that was some years ago now so there may be newer applications available now that would fulfill all my desires; however this is to be a web based application and will have all the features that I want.
The basic requirement for a birders application (IMHO) is to record:
I’m pretty sure that all the applications I’ve tried in the past have been able to do this, they’d be pretty useless if they couldn’t. However that’s where a lot of them end. The basic features of BirdSpotter.org will extend these with these requirements:
I’ve a number of desirable features that I’d like to add at a later date. These include:
I’m sure more features will occur to me as things go along and I’m hoping that ideas will be contributed from the birding public; but that’s it in a nutshell. If there’s features you’d like to see then please leave a comment and I’ll add them to the list.
Posted in features.
Welcome to The BirdSpotter blog. This blog is for announcements and comments about the BirdSpotter online application. This is just the first post, there’ll be more to follow as development gets going so send me your comments and ideas about how you’d like to see an application to behave and what features you’d like to use.
Posted in Announcements.