About the guide
The following covers the various technologies used to put this guide
together, if you are interested in that sort of thing.
Web Hosting
The hosting for the site, from LastDigital (www.lastdigital.co.uk),
provides support for Perl scripts and a MySQL database. Virtually all
data for the site is held in the MySQL database. Some of this data is
summarised data from the county moth database and is transferred from
the county moth database to the web guide database on a periodic basis.
Due to this there may be some lag between record submission and the
data appearing in the guide.
Extensive Perl scripts and library packages written by myself provide
and support the more dynamic features of the guide, for example,
searching, comparison and filtering.
Style sheets
The guide makes heavy use of CSS (cascading style sheets) that provide
a standard look and feel. I tend to use the Mozilla Firefox browser
that has more extensive CSS support than the current Internet Explorer.
If you use the latter then you may notice odd quirky page display.
Javascript
Some Javascript is used in the pages, mainly for form validation. If
Javascript is disabled in your browser then this should not stop the
guide working.
Cookies
The guide uses cookies to store information about preferences,
filtering and session information. To make the most of the guide the
site should be allowed to set cookies in your browser. However, it
should be able to operate with restricted features even when it
is not allowed to set cookies.
Distribution maps
These are produced by DMAP (
www.dmap.co.uk)
based on data from the county moth database.
DMAP Boundary files from Martin Sandford of the Suffolk Biological
Records Centre have also been used in the production of the maps.
Photographs and Thumbnails
Photographs are uploaded to the guide from the members area and are
immediately available in the guide. Thumbnails are produced by myself
offline after photographs have been uploaded to the guide using the
Perl ImageMagick module.
Development
The following are additional tools are used in the development of this
site.
CD Version
A CD version is available of the guide. This currently lacks much of
the dynamic behaviour of the web version of the guide, such as
searching, filtering and preferences. The CD version is generated using
a Perl script and re-uses the web guide Perl libraries. The intention
being to have as much shared code between the web and standalone
versions as possible.
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