Ben Locke
The gallery has been updated with another three images. The Minotaur Beetle was photographed at home in the Forest of Dean. The European Otter was in Norfolk whilst the Giant Golden Orb-weaver was in the sweltering heat of the Sinharaja rainforest in Sri Lanka.
These images have been added to the gallery. The leopard was photographed in Wilpattu, Sri Lanka in 2017 and I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a good 30 minutes or so with this cat. The White Stork was captured in Sankt Peter-Ording, in north Germany about 50km from the Danish border. I … Read more
When I decided to re-write this site, the actual appearance of it took a bit of a back seat while I worked out the functionality. Colours, fonts, backgrounds, gradients, etc were essentially just picked at speed so that I could get on with the coding. It didn’t turn out too bad in general, and I … Read more
Another thirteen photographs have been added to the galleries – 12 species from England, Germany, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka and South Africa. Many of these pictures are from the backlog that built up whilst developing this new website, whilst others, such as the Pearl-bordered Fritillaries and Wood Whites were photographed in the last couple of … Read more
I’ve made some changes to the species list to make it more responsive to smaller devices. I think the standard view of the list is ok as it is really. There’s far too much information on it to comfortably display it all on the smallest of screens, but the key columns are always visible, and … Read more
I actually enjoy building websites, especially when they present challenges and problems to solve along the way. Once the building is done though, other less enjoyable tasks need doing… making sure the site is as secure as it can be from hackers, other security issues, backup processes, data rollback processes, etc. Another such tedious task … Read more
I’ve added a previous/next post link to the bottom of every news item. It shows the previous and next news post that was posted in that category only. For example, if you’re looking at an ‘On the trail of…’ article, the prev/next links will take you to the prev/next ‘On the trail of…’ article, even … Read more
Optimisation of this site has been a big task. It always feels like you’ve finished once a site is built and functioning correctly, but as with any software development, proper testing takes time, and so does getting things running as smoothly as possible. I’ve been using GTMetrix as my main method of performance testing as … Read more
Moving from Windows to Linux brought with it a whole heap of benefits as far as this site’s performance and stability is concerned. It also brought with it the need for me to be more disciplined in my naming conventions, both in coding and in file-naming. When you migrate from one server to another you … Read more
The site continues to perform really well on the new server. If anything, it’s surprised me with just how well it’s performing. There have been no errors due to lack of server resources (or any other reason for that matter), so I have decided to turn CloudFlare back on. There’ll be no discernible difference to … Read more