Steve and I uploaded another five videos to vimeo last Tuesday evening, bringing the total to 475, but the video harvesting function hast still not been restored to the website, which remains stuck on the 450th video which was uploaded a year ago. We only resumed uploading videos again six weeks ago.
Apologies to everyone who has been unable to access the website since we had to close it down in October last year because it became corrupted by malicious people. It has been very painful for me not to have a website all this time and to continue to share information, which is the site’s raison d’être. Thankfully, after an upgrade to the system, we are back online. Further work is required to fully restore the site and carry out hoped for improvements. Fingers crossed and watch this space.
Calamity struck twice in recent days. My computer died of what most likely was heat exhaustion and the hard drive proved to be irretrievable. I thought I had backed up in August. It turned out that I was months out; the date was April 6. I have lost all my contacts information and the 1,300 words I had written about my magical time with Simon on Easter Island and in Buenos Aires. 1,300 words had only taken us to day two on the island.
For many weeks the website had been under attack from evil forces to the point where we have had to close it down. This at last provides an opportunity to update the system, but the site developer is unable to say when this is likely to happen because of his workload and the amount of work needed to restore the site. Ghastly!
While I was overseas an email from a curator at EOL arrived stating that my collection has been updated after a hiatus of more than a year when EOL’s data harvesting system failed. On my return I checked the link and all 387 of my videos were present instead of the past year or more’s output languishing in the Encyclopaedia of Life Videos on Vimeo page. I have a backlog of 150 taxa (species) files which were ready to send prior to the harvesting failure and I will need to check my albums for additional taxa logged since. Plenty of fun and games ahead.
Today I launched a new Album with the above title. Over the years friends have occasionally photographed me filming. And a while back I asked Hugh Alexander to photograph members of the night filming crew. During the past two weeks I took some location pictures for the Album which I then assembled complete with captions. I shall post updates as new material is added. Please note: some of the images are portrait format for which the website is not really suited. A few of these will be replaced as soon as possible but it is not worth delaying the launch.
Have just sent Andrew a zip folder containing 149 XMLs. There were 151 species on my list, but only 149 XMLs. I was quietly going round the bend thinking I had missed a couple and asked Steve to make my list alphabetical when I worked with him two evenings ago. The original list was grouped according to subject and location in the Albums. There were 70 moths, of which two were duplicated. To complicate matters, I sent EOL an email regarding the Data Object GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) and the reply contained the frustrating information that EOL’s data harvesting system is severely malfunctioning and will take a while to rectify. Steve and I uploaded new videos to vimeo a month ago. My most recently harvested videos on EOL date back to 5 months ago, though we uploaded 3 videos to vimeo 3 months ago.
After working through my albumsI I listed the final few new XMLs for the Encyclopaedia of Life (EOL), bringing the total number of taxa (species) to 148 since July 2014. The list is an essential pre-requisite for using the template created by Ben Sinclair from which the XMLs are generated with their taxonomic information, descriptive texts and links to relevant video frames and photos. Many of the species are already on my gallery pages at EOL as videos, but many will appear there for the first time. I generated all the new XMLs for birds and am waiting to hear if they are okay from site developer Andrew (only doing this once a year gives scope for error). Based on the to-ing and fro-ing of past experience, it will be a while before the XMLs are safely lodged with EOL.
Andrew put up the re-written and pared-down home page today. It summarises what I do and why I do it, plus where my work is preserved for posterity. Andrew’s insistence that I retain the original first paragraph had me stymied for a while because it precluded the use of the first person in the new material until I replaced ‘The’ with ‘My’.
Today I uploaded the 50th Gallery Page, more than doubling the number of pages since the website’s relaunch 21 months ago. I was premature in thinking I had finished writing up my image library because I forgot to include Hugh Alexander’s 118 aerial photos, bringing the total number of images to 4,149. Plus, I have just finished selecting some 220 frames from the four latest tapes for future capture. The work continues.