Dev diary

This site is now a ‘Brave Verified Creator’. By becoming a Brave Verified Publisher, the site joins over 240,000 publishers and creators on the Brave platform able to receive Basic Attention Token (BAT) donations from Brave’s over 7 million monthly … Read more

I’ve tried to build this site as efficiently as possible and to maximise re-use of code wherever I can. As a result most pages are constructed ‘on the fly’ on the server when a visitor requests to look at them, … Read more

If you’re one of the very few who read this section of the site (what’s wrong with you?!) then you’ll know I like to measure the optimisation of my site with GTMetrix. Getting as close to a 100% score on … Read more

I’m happy with the performance of the website. It’s been consistent, stable and fast since the re-write of the site (once a decent new host was found). There’s always room for improving the speed of page load times though, especially … Read more

I’ve made a small tweak to the homepage so that it now shows the most popular (most visited) posts. I might extend this to appear on other pages, or it might just remain on the homepage only. (update – I’ve … Read more

It’s been a while since I made any updates to the site. Lockdown has taken it’s toll to some extent – on a personal level the Coronavirus has brought with it some sad news, some stressful situations, and although far … Read more

I didn’t expect to be writing this trip report exactly two weeks before I’d even left the country, but here we are. Foreign Office advice and airlines pulling out of flying to my destination mean that my next trip isn’t … Read more

I’ve been trying to work out a way to automatically generate taxonomic species diagrams from my species list. I’ve nearly achieved it, subject to one annoying problem. It’s close enough though, so I’ve put it live anyway. The diagrams can … Read more

The species list has been further improved to accommodate the inclusion of kingdoms other than the previous singular ‘animalia’ kingdom. Previously there were two methods of filtering by country. The first was using a drop-down menu, which has now been … Read more

After many years of faithfully adding new species onto my list, I’ve finally decided to start looking beyond the single animalia domain, and including species from other domains. Animalia will continue to be my main focus (by a long way), … Read more