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.
An email arrived confirming that my resource has been re-harvested and with the updated link to my Gallery showing 340 taxa (species) instead of the previous 220. It was in reply to my email of 14 October drawing attention to the fact that the list we supplied on 30 September contained some 350 items. The discrepancy is the result of replacing two different names which EOL regards as synonyms, with a valid name occupying a single page.
The updated XML files we sent before my overseas trip were all successfully harvested and are on my EOL gallery, BUT they replaced the existing material. I should have known better than not to include the existing files with the new ones, especially after Andrew asked me if he had sent everything, meaning everything. Anyway, today we have sent the files to EOL and I await news of their successful harvesting.
For some weird reason when we added over 100 new XMLs to EOL, all but a few of the original XMLs vanished from my EOL gallery as if they had never been there at all, even though Andrew sought to make them compatible with WordPress. All the new XMLs were successfully uploaded. After waiting a couple of weeks for Andrew to work on my corrections to the original XMLs, I decided to take matters into my own hands and re-do the lot from scratch. I then added over 100 new data files, which had been accumulating since the first new batch. All this took several days of long and concentrated effort. Andrew came to my place this morning and transferred all the XMLs from my downloads to his USB. He has some code checking to do before arranging for the XMLs to be harvested by EOL. As noted in my 8 May post, we’ll see. Check EXPANDED PRESENCE ON EOL 30 March 2014.
Today I sent out a newsletter informing subscribers of 9 new videos, which brings the total on vimeo to 223, with more in the pipeline. A recent video of a female Wood Duck nestling 10 ducklings for the night drew more comments from vimeo members than any other video of mine. My presence on vimeo is resulting in frequent emails, including one from a production house in West Australia offering credit for footage, but no payment.