Birdpost Chatter

New Feature: Tags!!

We've been working on this for the last few weeks and it's finally here. Our tagging feature gives you the ability to 'Tag' or 'Label' your sightings with as many tags as you want to give you infinite ways to slice and dice your lifelists. 

Do go to your Tags menu, go to your My Birds page and look at the Sorting Links. Notice on the right it says, "Sort by: Tags | Bird Name | Date Sighted | Family." That "Tags" link is where you will be able to view and sort your pictures in any way that you want to label them.

Think of putting your sightings in Folders as something from the 1950's. The Tagging feature is pure Web 3.0! For example, if you saw a black phoebe out in back from your house on a Saturday morning with your son Bradley, you could 'Tag' that sighting with the words, "backyard, Scotty, Saturday." 

There are several ways to do it:

1.) You just click the "Add a Bird" button from your "My Birds" page and type in the following tags, separated by commas, in the appropriate space: "Backyard, Scotty, Saturday." 

2.) "What about adding tags after the fact? I've already uploaded so many birds!" Not a problem. On your Lifelist (My Birds page), if you want to add tags to any bird you've already added, just click on the bird and look to the left viewer. If I also saw an Acorn Woodpecker in my backyard with Scotty, I would click on Acorn Woodpecker, look to the left viewer, and click the "Edit" link (see below)

After clicking the "Edit" link, I would get this dialog box:

I've typed in "Backyard, Scotty" in the tagging field.

3.) This allows you to then sort your lifelist by any of those tags. When you click on "Tags" on your "My Birds" page, there will be a list of Tags that you've already used to label other bird sightings. If I now click my "Scotty" tag, I can see all of the Birds I've seen with Scotty.  

4.) To add tags to a sighting that you're mapping, just double-click on the map like you normally do, and add the tags in the appropriate field.

The possibilities are endless, so go have some fun!!

Sighting Tags: Almost Here!

We're just testing and making bug fixes to a feature we're very excited about, and one that will address a lot feature requests we've gotten: the ability to tag sightings. This will allow you to sort, slice, and dice your Lifelist any imaginable way. In other words, you can "tag" (put labels) on sightings. So, for that Great Blue Heron I saw in my yard a couple of Sundays ago with my son Scotty, I could add the tags, "Heron, Scotty, Yard, 2008". This will allow me to then search or sort my sightings by any of these tags. So, later on, I could click "Yard" and all of my yard sightings will come up together on my Lifelist. Or "2008" or whatever. You could do the same for your Mexico 2007 trip. Tag it "Mexico 2007" and all of your Mexico 2007 birds will display in the same ways you can already see your current Lifelist. If you already liked your current Birdpost lifelist, you're about to start liking it dramatically more! Thanks -- JP

Rare Bird Alert is fixed!

Let us know if there are any further problems. Some users reported Rare Bird Alerts outside their pre-established parameters. We think we have solved this now. Thanks!

(Good) Growing Pains: Calling All Ruby on Rails Progammers!

Birdpost users. Thanks again for your support. If any of you know really good Ruby on Rails programmers (if you're a Birdpost user or birder it would be phenomenal) then please email us as soon as possible. We have a small team of developers but need 2 more to do the things we want to do. We're very excited about some upcoming features which will provide more flexibility in adding birds, categorizing (tagging sightings), and providing more leeway for users to share with community details about their trips, their knowledge, and more! Thanks!