Monday, September 7

Discontinuing BirdTrax Maintenance

Hello to the BirdTrax community,

I thought it would be about time to officially announce that I am discontinuing BirdTrax maintenance. BirdTrax will be going down on January 25, 2015. It's been a great gadget for tens of thousands of users for three years now, but an upgrade is on its way. Google keeps evolving and changing, and with it gadgets seem to be heading more and more towards the trash can. The gadget has been getting some rough edges, and it will be staying this way. I'm still happy to take a look at your codes and suggest fixes, but I won't be developing or maintaining further.

Good birding!
Zach DeBruine

2 comments:

  1. I'm considering developing a website for county birders which shows essentially the data shown on your birdtrax pages. I had planned to just use birdtrax but as you are discontinuing support this is not a long term solution. I have looked at your tutorial on how to write an e-bird rarity code. I'm novice and will need to hire some help, but it looks like the process you outline will work well for one state/county to be on a page, but if the site has multiple pages it looks like this would be clumsy as many different additions to the header would be involved. Am I correct in this assumption?

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    1. Ed, yes you are correct. A long-term and robust solution would require writing a script to request eBird API information essentially the same way as I showed in my tutorial, only using a different API. It would not take long for a code-savvy person to apply the approach demonstrated in the tutorial to the sightings API. I don't think it would be as difficult for a programmer to show data for multiple counties as you think, since most of the code can be stuck in a function and then easily re-used for various counties as much as you like. -- Zach

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