Blogs

I've just changed the articles page so that it now displays the average user vote per article, as well as letting you sort it by title and vote. Of course we only have 3 articles so it doesn't matter too much at the minute, but it will get bigger!

If there are any articles you would like to write, or pre-written ones you would like to add then please do let us know either by emailing them in or using our contact form. We are interested in any articles so long as they are about Carabus!

This is a list of things I need to do with the site. Let me know if you think you can lend a hand with these tasks (Goodness knows I need it!), otherwise have a look and see if there's anything else you want added:

As part of the changes to the forum I've now added user profiles. If you log in and go to your account you should see the difference. By clicking on the "User Profile" tab you will be able to add additional details such as your location, what beetle groups you are interested in etc. If there's a field you want added please contact me and I'll be more than happy to add it.

Our new forum is now online. It's different from the old one (phpBB) and we've sacrificed some prettiness for usefulness. This forum now fits in to the site theme with no problems and doesn't mess up the user accounts. This means you now have access to your accounts through this site which should make changing your passwords and emails easier. You can also control some of the blocks on this site (for example clustr maps, rank us etc). Soon I hope to be able to give you a profile page where you can tell us a bit about yourself and allow you to upload an exchange list.

The carabusonline forum will be offline for a short while. Unfortunately trying to integrate it properly into the site means sacrificing too much control over layout and user administration. It also means you as users are put through too much hassle to change your password/email etc.

A new, hopefully better forum will be released soon.

Thanks for your patience

Matt

Hopefully you'll have noticed the little black arrows on each of the navigation blocks. These allow you to collapse blocks that you don't want to see so you are just left with the titles. The obvious aim of this is to help you focus your browsing. So for instance you can collapse the rank, navigation and browser blocks when you are looking at a species so that only the taxonomy and other information blocks are left visible.

If you are logged in the site should remember your preference for collapsed blocks...yet another reason to register!

I have just added Clustr Maps as a block on our front page. I recently saw this on Vince Smith's site whilst reading his blog on biological taxonomy in Drupal. We've had access to this data for quite a while through google analytics, for example the number of visits (top 10) per country since December 2007 are displayed below. But from now you can have a look at where we're getting visits from too.

As I'm sure you've noticed we recently added Google Ads to the front page. This is to help cover some of the costs of hosting, so please feel free to click the ads! We will keep them here for a short while to see if they are worthwhile, and for you to tell us if they are too intrusive. They will only occur on the front page.

Let us know what you think

Matt

We now have 1495 subspecies in the database. Can you help us reach 1500? If you have a species we don't then we would love a 400px wide photo on a white background. Please contact us and we will be more than happy to put it up on the site and give you an acknowledgment on the species page and in our contributors page.

Please sign up to the new site. Its free and requires no personal information. Plus signing up to the site gives you access to our new forums.

James