Phasmid Study Group

Some new newsletter back issues have been made available for members. All of the issues for which I have been editor (109-115) are now available as PDFs. The remaining issues (43-108) will be added in batches over the cvoming months. Issues for which I have been sent digital copies of the original will be first, issues I have to scan will be added later.

The 'Forthcoming Events' page has now been updated to a Google Calendar. If you have a Google Calendar you can now subscribe to our calendar and automatically receive information on new events.

Work on a basic version of this site in Spanish is underway, the translation being done by Pablo Valero Riquelme. Besides the work done in translating the content, there is some to be done by us in order to implement this in a logical and sustainable way.

 Any other offers of translation are gratefully accepted!

The species taxonomy on this site has now been expanded upwards to include the taxon Orthopteroidea, which allows us to list various sister-taxa to the phasmida, namely the blattodea (cockroaches) and mantodea (mantids). All three orders (phasmida, blattodea, mantodea) have Scratchpad sites and linking between them allows people to quickly switch between sites.

With some recent new functionality provided by the EDIT team we have made some changes to how the site displays content. At present this seems to work in the vast majority of web browsers, although there are some problems with IE7.

The homepage has had a bit of a revamp, displaying a summary of recent content and providing easy navigation to the rest of the site.

Using the taxonomy browser on the homepage you can navigate to a phasmid taxon and then click the blue cross to get a summary of all the information held in the site on that taxon as well as additional information from external sources.

Over the next few weeks and months there will be more information relating to etymology and vernacular names, as well as some additional articles for the 'Knowledge Base' section.

One thing that has annoyed me over recent months is the number of out-of-date or otherwise inaccurate versions of the species list that have proliferated over the internet.

 We will soon be making the species list available in machine-readable XML format. This will mean that any website that wants to display the species list can always display the most recent version, approved by the PSG.

We will be first collaborating with StickTalk, who until now have used their own copy of the list to provide their interactive version and livestock label generator. Once implemented their list will be updated on a regular basis from our own XML version.

What this means in practise is that when we make a change on the species list, it will, within a short period of time, be made automatically on the StickTalk website.

Once we have this process working correctly we will begin offerring this service to other people who provide the list on their own websites, and look towards adding some additional functionality!

Some new photos of this event have been provided by Paul Brock, who has also provided some photographs for the 'Who's Who' image gallery.

This website has now moved to a new domain: phasmid-study-group.org.

 All links to pages at phasmida.myspecies.info will be automatically forwarded.

The version of the PSG Culture List on the website has been updated, and is now correct as of the end of February, 2008. In toyal 289 species have now been attempted in culture.

The first 21 issues of the PSG Newsletter are now available as PDF files from the Phasmid Serials section.

 There will be a few more shortly, and the rest will follow once I have scanned them.