Birdpost Chatter

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!

Yosemite!

Driving back from a quick trip to Yosemite with the family - didn't get much chance to bird, but did see a white-headed woodpecker, mountain chickadee, and a red-breasted nuthatch. It was absolutely beyond gorgeous out there. Above is a photo I just took with my phone of "El Capitan".

Iterating....

Thank you all for your great ideas, suggestions, new feature requests. We are working as quickly as possible and we thank you for your patience!! By end of next week we are hoping to have our "tagging" feature complete, which will allow for endless flexibility in sorting, organizing, and categorizing your sightings. We are also continually working on many other issues, so thanks for the feedback and understanding! We definitely consider this a community "family" effort. You guys are as much a part of the site's success as anyone. Every sighting posted on a map, every photo uploaded, every photo rated, every suggestion, every friend you add, every checklist you track, every piece of information you fill out on your profile makes the entire site better and more useful! Thanks again.

Picture ranking feature

When you click on any species page, you can help rank the order that these pictures are displayed by rating pictures from 1-5 stars. For example, the Green Heron Species Page includes photos uploaded and taken by 9 different users (notice I said "and taken." You must be the owner of photos to upload them or to give Birdpost the permission to upload them). When you click on any picture, you see the picture displayed in a larger form in the "viewer" on the left side of the page, and there are 5 little boxes with stars where you can rate the photo. Every rating done by every user figures is computed, and these ratings determine the order in which these pictures are displayed, including the "lead" photo used as the default on all checklists. TomGroberg has 3 photos, for example that are "lead" photos (highest rated and therefore the default). Stuart Immonen has 13! These rankings matter, and it's fun to do! Happy Birding -- JP

World Rankings Now Showing Top 50

See your profile page for the latest Birdpost rankings! We've expanded it to the top 50 users...

New Feature: Promote your Birding Website or Blog

OK - as of a few hours ago we've finally got the Profile website link feature ready to go. If you go to your profile and click the blue "Edit Profile" button, you'll see 2 fields, one to put the URL (link) to your website or blog and another to type what you want the link to say. Click my Profile Page to see the example. To the right of my picture, you'll see the words "Personal Web Site" and a link to Birdpost. Hopefully, those of you with Bird websites, photography websites, or blogs will take the opportunity to promote these sites through Birdpost.

While you're at it, take the time to fill out your profile page, including your Favorite Birds, Nemesis Birds (the ones you want to see but have eluded you), fill out the Q&A, etc. Take care!

Huge thanks!

A big thanks to those who have submitted their bird photos to build up Birdpost's database. We want this to be the most beautiful user-created gallery of bird photos in the world! As we've said previously, this section of the site will always remain free, and if you ever want to remove the photos, just let us know and we'll remove them right away. We're also creating a feature so that every picture has a credit linking to your profile page, that will display a link to your website or blog. We hope to really promote these bird photographers' great websites and Flickr pages!

Separate subject, crazy sighting this morning. My son Scotty got my attention at 8:00 a.m. this morning, and told me to run outside into our backyard. There was a Great Blue Heron perched atop our neighbor's roof! Not your typical sighting near downtown Palo Alto! Great way to start the day -- JP

New users!

There have been a lot of you today. Don't forget to fill out your profile information. One of my favorite things to do on Birdpost is see where people are from, what are their favorite birds, etc. Welcome!! Jason and Ben