Phasmid Study Group

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One thing that has annoyed me over recent months is the number of out-of-date or otherwise inaccurate versions of the species list that have proliferated over the internet.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

I have changed the foodplant taxonomy on the right-hand side. It now arranges plants in the currently accepted scientific classification. I appreciate this may annoy many people who just want to easily find out about a foodplant and the species that eat it, but it does have one important advantage.

 By arranging the plants in this way it is possible to see what plants (that are known to be foodplants for phasmids) are related to each other. This may suggest possible alternative foodplants for many species, and will hopefully encourage people to experiemnt with new foodplants.

Well in the few weeks since work on this site started we have created over 2000 'pages'. Unfortunately this is both an under and over-estimate.

The counter treats each item (or 'node') we enter as a pag, whether it is a 'true' webpage or just an item in the Publications Index. So in this way it under-estimates the number of what most people would recognise to be a page.

However there are several thousand pages of Phasma and Les Monde des Phasmes, so there is also more content than is suggested too.

Hopefully this paradox will be resolved at some point in the future!

 I would like to thank Mark Bushell for doing some great work in 'tagging' some of these nodes with species and foodplant labels, so that they are available through the relevant section of the right-hand menu.

Today I have scanned some photographs that Allan Harman has kindly allowed us to put on the website. These are now available in the Image Galleries.

Members are encouraged to submit their own images to the site,  with everyone helping we should be able to make a comprehensive photograph collection. 

Today the Phasmid Study Group was added to the Nature Societies Online list produced by the Natural History Museum, there is also a link to this website.