Introducing Mammalwatching.com 2.0
Hello,
After a lot of work – mainly from other people – the new mammalwatching.com is now live and appears, more or less, to be working. When building this we tried to take on board a bunch of comments I got from people here a year or two ago – better search function, ability to comment more easily on reports, ability to see most recent comments on the blog and so on. I hope to improve some of this over the coming months (especially being able to make comments on individual reports). But its been a lot of work just to recreate what I had before, in a shiny new site, so please bear with me. In the meantime I am relying on advice and feedback from you all to test and improve the new site.
First, I am sure it isn’t all working perfectly. Please let me know what needs fixing.
Second, I am sure that things can be improved. Please let me know what you like and what you don’t like.
Third the new community forum (or community blog) ( no… I don’t know what to call it) is now here https://www.mammalwatching.com/blog/ and it is integrated into the site. Please post on here from now on. Hopefully all your logins etc have been moved automatically to the new site… but let me know if there are glitches.
Hope everyone’s summers are going well. Mine improved significantly this weekend with some Gervais Beaked Whales off of North Carolina. Hope to see some of you at the British Bird Fair next weekend.
Oh one more thing …. I am interested to see whether this update gets sent out … so if you get this could you just comment below to say you got it?
cheers
Jon
13 Comments
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Ry Beaver
Hi Jon, I will have a good look around then comment – I didnt get this emailed to me – but got another couple of mammalwatchign emails on the 14/08 & 16/08. Cheers Ry
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Venkat Sankar
Jon, the new site looks great! I’ll certainly try to spend more time looking through it, but don’t really have the time now…
A couple of questions/observations though:
1. Has the old blog been completely integrated into this new forum? I ask because people are still posting on mammalwatching.wordpress.com and those posts are not being integrated into the new site.
2. The country pages (“places”) have your reports and/or species lists under the “profile” section for the places you’ve visited. However, those same places also have your reports in PDF format under the “community reports” section as well. This seems a bit redundant to me. Perhaps, in the “profile” section we could have an overview of mammal watching in a certain destination with a list of top sites in that country selected from trip reports and information on those sites (i.e. key species, guide contacts, etc.). This would take a lot of work though for some very diverse or frequently visited sites however, to integrate all the info from trip reports, so I’m not sure who would do it. -
Miles Foster
Many thanks for the email alert, which I received this morning (20th August). Mammalwatching has always been a terrific resource and the new site is a pleasure to use, I like the general feel of it, easy to navigate, and easy on the eye. I know how much work goes into updating a website so thanks and congratulations. As for feedback, I agree with Venkat’s 1st point above. I also notice that some of the links embedded in the old trip reports do not work but I imagine this could be very difficult to fix and it is a minor disadvantage given the wealth of information the site offers. I very much look forward to using Mammalwatching to help plan future trips (e.g. S. de Andujar next year).
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Paul Carter
Hi Jon. Great look to the site. I received the email above. I have tried to log-in and register for the forum and told a password been sent to my email but nothing arrived in 30 mins, not sure if it is supposed to take a minute or a day? I tried as new user/email and also with new password for current email; no joy on both. Cheers, Paul C
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Steve Davis
Hi Jon, good to meet up with you at the Birdfair – thoroughly enjoyed your talk too ! It is remarkable how things have progressed in a short time….
I’m probably not the best person to comment on the layout changes, but wondered if you could put a prominent tab to allow access to the mammal checklist that you produced ?
Best of luck in Mongolia….
Steve & Karen. -
Jon Hall
Thank you for all for your comments. I have taken some on board already and will think what to about the rest.
A couple of points in answer to some of these.
1. Yes, the new forum here replaces the old one, but I need to set up a mail server to send out emails with news posts and – until that is fixed – will continue to send out alerts from the old blog. But people have stopped using it now I think.
2. Some of the links aren’t working I know and over the next few months I will rework each of the country pages to fix those.
3. I take Venkat’s point on the summary information. I am going to rework my trip reports somehow to have more of a summary on the main page and a fuller linked report in the list of community reports. I also plan to include printable PDFs of my reports that don’t have photos (a suggestion from Richard Webb). Venkat’s suggestion of country summaries of key sites, guides etc would be ideal. But – as he noted – its a lot of work and probably not something I can do in the forseeable future unless I can get an intern.
4. Finally I know a few people have not been able to reset their passwords. This is some sort of glitch depending on what servers you are using I think (or something like that!). Anyway I know how to fix it now so you can email me if that is a problem and I can reset your password myself.
I will give the new site a couple of months to bed down and then see what else can be improved.
Thanks everyone
Jon
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Mike Richardson
Yes, comments working fine. New site looks great although I will take a more thorough look when I have more time. Thanks again for all your hard work Jon.