Ed Baker's blog
AGM & Winter Meeting Competition Winners
Merchandise
The new PSG Merchandise can be ordered from http://www.cafepress.co.uk/stickinsect.
Any ideas for new items should be sent using this form: http://phasmid-study-group.org/email/edbaker/personal.
New forum design
The Phasmid Study Group forums have been given a facelift - please check them out at http://phasmid-study-group.org/forum. Anybody is welcome to post, even non-members. We hope to implement a members' only area soon.
Happy posting!
Migration to Phasmida SpeciesFile taxonomy
Tue, 17/11/2009 - 4:54pm — Ed BakerIn a third major milestone in 24 hours the site has moved from using a partial phasmid taxonomy (used for development) to a complete phasmid taxonomy imported from Phasmida SpeciesFile. This means that taxon pages are now available for all phasmid taxa. The migration was done with the assistance of Simon Rycroft who works for the Scratchpad project.
This is the first stage in a more comprehensive cooperation with the Phasmida SpeciesFile, the next stage will see a SpeciesFile panel being added to taxon pages, allowing users to see what information Phasmida SpeciesFile has about that taxon complete with links to that information.
These milestones show that this website is rapidly becoming the most comprehensive online resource available to phasmid enthusiasts - not a bad achievement for two years work.
3,000 pages (another milestone)
Tue, 17/11/2009 - 12:24pm — Ed BakerThis blog post is the 3,000th page to be posted to this website. Although that figure under-estimates the true number of pages by a long way. The reason for this is the page counter (bottom of the left menu) counts each piece of content (link, image, publication) entered as a page. So it doesn't include the page automatically created for every phasmid taxon (another 4, 536 pages).
Although it may sound like a lot there is still a huge way to go - most species, even those currently kept in culture, we don't even have images for. So keep sending your content in!
Half a million page views
Mon, 16/11/2009 - 11:16pm — Ed BakerWe have just passed the half-million views mark. Many thanks to all of the people who keep coming back and tell us what they like, and what's missing. So keep your feedback coming in!
External Links
In order to make the Phasmid Study Group website (http://phasmid-study-group.org) more useful a change is being made to the way that links to external sites are being handled. These will now be displayed on the Knowledge Base and Species pages - and will be deep links (to particular pages on a website rather than just the front page. For an example see the Knowledge Base page on breeding and rearing: http://phasmid-study-group.org/category/Knowledge-Base/1191.
If you have suggestions for additional links (whether they be whole sites, sections of sites, or even just specific blog posts) please submit them to me via this form: http://phasmid-study-group.org/content/Submit-content.
Phasmid Videos
A new phasmid videos section has been uploaded to the Phasmid Study Group website. If you have any more then please use our sumit content form.
Phasmids from Badas Peat Swamp Forest
A new video has been made available via the Phasmid study Group website, recorded by PSG member Mel Herbert for a previous meeting. It has been trasnferred from VHS and is now available to watch here: Phasmids of Badas Peat Swamp Forest.
Site Upgrade
The Phasmid Study Group website has today been upgraded to the latest version of the Scratchpad/Drupal software. Technically this is quite a challenge and a few areas of the site are not yet back to normal. We expect normal service to resume over the next few days.
There are several advantages to this new system. The site's internal phasmid taxonomy (used to organise the content) will be automatically imported at regular intervals from the Phasmida SpeciesFile, there are several usability improvements and we can now develop the site to include some interesting new content (more on that to come soon).
