Since the BESG linked up with the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research (RMBR) in July this year LINK, we have been undertaking extensive housekeeping to clean up the website.
The website has been in operation for more than seven years now and we have posted more than 2,500 items on bird behaviour. With a website this large, it is inevitable that a lot of things can and do go wrong. For one, link rot LINK sets in as other websites get removed for one reason or another. Images also disappear for whatever reasons. And the fact the BESG website has undergone three changes is a major contributing factor to all these problems.
The original website using blogspot (above left) LINK was started on 25th July 2005 with a post on “Why Bird Ecology” LINK. We continued using blogspot until 28th January 2007 after completing 314 posts. This blogspot series is still available on the net. With the help of Jacqueline Lau, we upgraded its website using WordPress (above right) as this has better features and themes LINK.
We started blogging with WordPress using the domain name of www.besgroup.talfrynature.com until Jac managed to obtain a more appropriate and unique name of www.besgroup.org in January 2011. All this while Jac has been generously hosting the website.
Links to pre-January 2007 blogspot posts have mostly been changed to www.besgroup.org … and those to talfrynature.com have now been adjusted to besgroup.org as the latter has been deleted from the net.
BESG broke away from the Nature Society (Singapore) LINK in January 2012 and moved closer to the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, National University of Singapore in 4th July LINK. This move is to ensure continuity.
The latest move has its hazards which will be rectified in due course as things stabilise. *Some of you may have noticed the search engine is not working properly. It may take some time to put things right and we seek your patience. In the meantime you can use “categories” as an alternative or try using the search engine a few time and hopefully you will be successful in one of the tries. I am unable to search using Firefox but manage after the second or so tries using the web browser Opera.
We have at last tidied up the website somewhat after testing each and every post – readjusting links and replacing images and audios. We are not able to rectify everything but 95% or more should be working properly. Some earlier links are beyond our control and a few images cannot be traced. Moving from Blogspot to WordPress has disrupted the neatness of the posts somewhat but the more recent posts are not a problem.
Should anyone spot errors, etc., do inform us. Thanks for your support.
*As of 2nd August, the search box is functioning properly, thanks to Kenneth Pinto and N Sivasothi of NUS.
YC Wee
Singapore
August 2012
5 Responses
Re the search box on this site not working properly, I think it’s because someone forgot to close the link (i.e. putting ) to the SingaporeBirds.net website whose banner is just above the search box, resulting in any click inside the search box directing one to the SingaporeBirds.net site. You could try checking that link.
My comment got truncated. Basically the singaporebirds.net link (above the search box) needs a proper /a closure which I suspect is missing right now.
Thanks Am. Will look into it.
Am’s comment triggered a chain reaction of sort. Thanks to Kenneth Pinto and N Sivasothi of NUS, the search box is now functioning properly.