iSpot & EML project blog

This week has seen the overhaul of the changes page in the My spot area of the site. It now has the ability to allow users to filter the list of changes by their type of link to each observation, so now they can choose to see any combination of the following:

• Observations authored by them
• Observation that they’ve commented on
• Observations on their favourites list
• Observations they’ve added an identification to
• Observations where they’ve agreed with an identification

The results are then displayed in sections depending on the nature of the change that’s taken place. The possible sections are:

• Core observation details edited by others
• Comments added by others
• Identifications added by others
• Identifications that have been agreed with by others

I’m now just working on adding a bit more help text to the page to try and improve the instructions to the users on what everything does.

The MegaLab officially stopped gathering data as of 31st October. This does not mean that the site is no longer available, in fact it’s business as usual for the Evolution MegaLab but it does mean that analysis has now begun on the data that has been collected to date. So to help with this I’ve added two new fields to the full data download that’s available to privileged users, these are: an id field that gives a unique reference to every line of the download, and the date the record was published – this is different from the date the record was made.

It’ll be interesting to hear the outcomes of the data analysis!

This week has seen the addition of links to both EOL and the NBN in iSpot. These links have been added to all identifications that have a valid taxon name in the NBN species dictionary, the scientific name is given precedence but if the scientific name is invalid and there is a valid English name then that is used instead. At present these links are only created once the identification has been published but I feel these links may be a good aid prior to publishing an identification and so it may be a good idea to look into how best to let users use these resources separately from publishing identifications.

As well as these links being added some of the other things that we’ve also done are as follows:

• Rich has added more custom reports for use by the iSpot team including User statistics which has some interesting information
• The active S159 students now have a badge so they can spot each other on the site
• it’s now possible to view who’s agreed with an identification, this still needs a bit of work to get the popup using a fixed size box and then the use of a scroll bar but it’s usable for the time being
• many small improvements to both the look & feel and functionality spread throughout the site!!

We’ve been doing a lot of work on addressing issues concerning various pages, both their look and usability. We’ve got the current theme working correctly on pages that previously had problems and have created a better way of viewing teasers of observations. The add some images page has been tidied up as has the second step page to it, which now also makes it clearer to users that they need to complete this step to use the images in the site.

The lightbox functionality has been tweaked for displaying images and this is now being used as the more feature on the latest observations block on the front page. The latest observations page that used to be linked to from this more link has been changed to the browse observations page a link to which can be found in the right hand ‘browse’ menu of the site. This page has lots of added functionality and allows users to apply filters to all the observations and browse the result.

The search functionality of the identification fields has also been improved and it now deals with hyphens as well as being able to search on multiple partial words. Hopefully this will be helpful to Mike and the problem with fungi

This is more of a reminder to myself in case this slips my mind at some point in the future.

The BeautyTips module that I’m using for creating the help icon popup uses an external library called ExplorerCanvas to allow it to work in IE.

I’ve just found that IE 7, and probably the earlier ones too, have a limit on the number of CSS documents that can be imported into a document, this limit is 31. This then means that IE 7 can throw a javascript error if the javescript is trying to use createStyleSheet() which in my case happens on line 112 of excanvas.js. This will only be a problem in the development environment where CSS optimisation is disabled. The live site has this enabled and so there should never be a large number of CSS documents being importedand so no problem.

The first part of the functionality that uses the species dictionary information to help users to give correct scientific and English names is now live on the approval site. Mike has already spotted on bug that I’ve now corrected. I’ve also changed how the English name search takes place, this isn’t on the approval site as yet, but it will mean that as the user types, the site will search for a match that contains what the user is typing and not just a match that begins with what the user is typing. I am considering changing this for the scientific name too, but I’m not altogether sure this would be beneficial. I’ll get the changes on the approval site to the way it searches today, and so long as no other major bugs are found I’ll add this functionality to the live site at the end of this week.

I’ve also just about finished implementing a help icon that will be able to be placed next to anything on the site and will give a speech bubble type popup giving further information. I’ve done this initially for the identification functionality but I’m sure we’ll want to use it else where on the site too.

The backup server is not yet in place, but as soon as it is we’ll get on with creating the research and backup site.

Rich L has been working on further improvements to the way lightbox is used to view images on the site, along with making various site pages more usable, including a replacement to the ‘latest observations’ page which will be named ‘browse observations’ and will allow the user to filter which of the full set of observations they browse. Rich’s also been looking at moving the S159 reporting on iSpot over to the new automated system that is being put in place on the OU’s Moodle installation.

This week has been a fairly short development week for iSpot with a fairly long team meeting on Monday, Richard G on annual leave Thursday and Friday and myself on leave today (Friday).

Richard G has continued to work on developing the species dictionary functionality which will provide the ability for users to make searches using the English or scientific name for what they have spotted. Richard has made great progress with this and gave me a quick demonstation of how it works. Initial impressions suggest that this really will be a great piece of functionality for iSpot and should help to engage the users. There have been issues trying to decide on the best way to use the data that we have to drive this functionality and the best way to present this to the user in a way that is helpful without being complex and it looks like Richard is well on the way to achieving this.

Following the team meeting on Monday, I began looking at a way to present to the user the names of users who have given agreements to identifications on iSpot. Whilst I was doing this I was reminded of some functionality called Lightbox which uses jQuery to present content to users which overlays the content of the referring page in an aesthetically pleasing way. I then realised that this could have a multitude of applications to various parts of iSpot. I have implemented the functionality to images on observations and this is now live. I am now looking at implementing a gallery view of the the latest 50 observations on iSpot which can be opened from the ‘Latest observations’ section on the home page and each of the images will have a title that will link to its relevant observation. I will then look at applying this to the identification of users who have made agreements of observation identifications. There are other potential uses that we can look at for this such as popping forms up, help text, map content. This is all a little speculative at the moment and needs some investigation but there is certainly the potential for other applications of Lightbox.

Neighbourhood Nature (S159) students have now begun to submit there observations to release their ECA so I have been liasing with Adrian Dodd and Phil Butcher to make sure that the XML file that iSpot is creating as a result of these submissions is being created, emailed and imported succesfully. Things seem to be going smoothly so far.

It looks like the rack space for the new research server will soon be available so that we can continue building and configuring the iSpot disaster recovery solution.

Over the last week I managed to move on significantly with the implementation of the Species dictionary on the site and am now working on making the predictive use of this when users are adding scientific and English to their determinations. After a couple of attempts at developing a user friendly way of integrating this feature I’ve opted to keep it as simple as possible, with a predictive field for both the scientific and English names, and then a button saying something like ‘get recommended’ that will then replace these fields with recommended values if the user clicks it. It’ll be easier to explain once I’ve implemented it.

Rich L has been busy not only creating a custom reports for iSpot team members to view, but also a reports area for these and a block linking to this to make live easier to navigate to them. As well as this he’s created a news area on the site with a block that appears on the front page to allow the dissemination of site info to users. He’s spent time with tweaking the S159 integration to make sure that’s working correctly and a few other tweaks to the site such as tidying up the latest observations page.

As well as working on the species dictionary I’ve also been doing some site maintenance and small tweaks including changing the ordering of the list on the changes page, and allowing any registered user to agree with an identification regardless of whether they have reputation.

The plan this week was to finish configuring the servers as part of the iSpot disaster recovery plan. Our new database back-up server was due to be moved in to the IET server rack and occupy the space that was due to be left by another IET server that was being decommissioned. There have been technical problems with moving files off of the old server which has resulted in the iSpot database back-up server still waiting for its new home. This move is now due to happen in the early part of next week so that we can then move on to finish the configuration. Here is an overview of what else has been happening with the iSpot software development this week:

• Taxonomy – Richard G has imported taxonomy data in to the iSpot database
• Images – After a request from Martin, Richard G has started work on developing a more user friendly way to view images at different resolutions after clicking from an observation (e.g. mid, original). Richard is also looking at framing the photographs to make them stand out a little more.
• ‘How did you hear about iSpot?’ – this has been added to the iSpot registration page as an optional piece of information. After a day or so of being live it looks like many new users are giving us this information and this will hopefully be of some use to us. Information that we have received so far shows that a majority of new users (since the functionality went live on Thursday 24/09/09) have come after hearing about iSpot in the OU Sesame magazine. Other sources include mentors, other publications (e.g. BNHS publication, BSBI new) and from OU courses. I am tempted to amend the drop down items slightly to encourage new users to give us additional information for many of the options (e.g. OU course)
• Profile – pictures – users can now upload pictures to their profile. The maximum resolution is 85×85px although iSpot does seem to accept and resize uploaded pictures that are larger than this (Jonathon, I see that you have already tried this functionality). Richard G designed a nice graphic to display in the case of users not having uploaded a picture.
• Profile – User first name and last name – this information can now be added to profiles for users
• Reports – I have been doing some research in to the best way to develop reports for iSpot (there are two main ways in Drupal). Both look feasible for the kind of things we will probably want to report on but I am yet to decide on which way will allow us to develop reports in the most time efficient way and still give the information and functionality that we will need. I have developed a mentor usage report (which Janice has requested) as a guinea pig for testing one of the methods.
• Development environment – Richard G has refreshed the approval site with data from the live site and we have both updated our local development sites. We have also both updated to the latest version of our version control software.

On the horizon:

• Next week we should hopefully be able to continue configuring the servers for the iSpot disaster recovery plan
• I am going to carry on looking at reporting
• I will also be looking at adding a ‘News’ block to the home page, most likely under the latest observation block. It is probably quite easy for some of these new pieces of functionality on iSpot to fall under the radar of many users so I think this is going to be useful. We will hopefully be able to have this as an RSS feed, a separate page with all news links on (with the most several most recent showing on the home page block) and have the content editable by iSpot team members.

As well as the changes tab I talked about in the previous post, this week we’ve also been working on the creation of a research/backup server. This is going well and we’ve now decided on the model we going to use to automate the regular updating of the backup server. We’ve also started adding the relevant software to the server to allow this. We are now having to wait until early next week for the server to be moved to its final physical location so we can configure the various services to work over the network.

Some other smaller things that have also been taken care of the week are:

• the location part of an observation is now compulsory
• the live site has been updated to the latest version of various modules, although a recent security release means another update is now needed!
• an RSS feed that we’d added to the front page for use with cool iris has been changed to limit the number of images to the latest 200 and to only images less than a month old. This previously gave a feed of all images from the site which might overwhelm the users browser and could also place a large load on the server if many people use the feed.