Advice for new website, please

[tom00_uk]

Originally Posted by solus

Would on-line mapped sightings make it even more threatened? By collectors/hunters/the merely curious? Unless of course it's some creepy crawly that might not be so attractive...

Edit: Paul's link works OK for me.

the Victorians made vast collections of creepy crawlies

[lovecrawlies]

Hi,

You might find it useful to talk to the person who set up the UK gloworm survey site. UK Glow worm survey home page

Good luck!

[sarahwest]

You could try having a look at the Indicia (free) software that is being developed to help people set up mini-recording schemes - Introduction - indicia - An introduction to the Indicia project. - Project Hosting on Google Code it sounds like it could be just what you need.
Good luck!

[poschiavanus]

Missed this thread first time round.

Paul Whelan's sites under the Biology.ie banner (particularly Nature's Calendar) and Irish Roadkill have been doing this for several years. AFAIK he uses the GoogleMaps API. So they might be worth looking at for ideas.

I have tried to install Indicia myself, but have run into problems with various dependencies (in particular it does not run on more recent versions of PHP). It's probably far too complex and heavyweight for the basic recording of point sightings. At some stage I mean to start a thread about this software suite.

For a map interface I would choose OpenLayers, either raw or in its OpenSpace manifestation used by the Ordnance Survey. You can display a range of maps (Google, OS OpenSpace, OS OpenData, OpenStreetMap, Bing) appropriate to your purpose. Indicia uses OpenLayers and a PostGIS database.

For a fairly simple display points & add enabling users to add further points OpenStreetBugs might be a good code base to start from. Source is available on Github here: https://github.com/emka/openstreetbugs.

[JennyS]

Posch beat me to it - I was going to suggest taking a look at Paul Whelan's biology.ie website too!

He's also in the process of doing a similar site aimed at getting school children to record their wildlife sitings: iSPY Nature - biodiversity nature notes and wildlife maps for young people.

(Pm me with your email address etc if you would like to ask him how it was all set up and I'll pass your message and contact details on to him)