A few design tweaks

A few design changes:1. The sidebar on the right-hand side of all pages of the website has been redesigned. The recent news section now includes thumbnails extracted from the news articles. The ‘recently viewed’ section, and the ‘latest tweet’ sections … Read more

Species list – more filters

I’ve made some minor changes to the species list. The column that displays the class, order and family to which a species belongs now renders the taxonomic groupings as hyperlinks, so it’s now possible to immediately jump to all other … Read more

Bug Squished

On at least one previous occasion in this dev diary, I’ve referred to a bug in the species list that I’d managed to convince myself was a bug in Google Chrome. It wasn’t. In fact, a number of different browsers … Read more

Filters, sorting and orders

I’ve added some more new functionality to the species list. Firstly, it is possible to completely hide the thumbnails, or to shrink them so that they don’t make the page any longer than it needs to be. Previously, the list … Read more

Species List tweak

I’ve made a very small tweak to the species list. It is now possible to choose to hide or show thumbnails for each species. The option is not currently persistent – that will be the next thing for me to … Read more

A few design tweaks

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 … Read more

Species list more responsive

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 … Read more

SEO

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 … Read more

Prev/Next links added

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, … Read more

Performance

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 … Read more

Case sensitivity

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, … Read more