Vince Smith's blog

WP6 Scratchpad Blog

Welcome to the new blog devoted to development of the EDIT Workpackage 6 Scratchpads. Here you will find the latest news, information and development activities relating to the Scratchpads. Contributions will be made by the Scratchpad site developers, but we also encourage announcements by any Scratchpad users about their sites.

Google Maps

Mapping (geolocation) of data is a core task of biologists and for many Scratchpad users their needs rarely exceed the capability of Google Maps. For this reason we have been experimenting with integrating Google Maps into the Scratchpads. At the time of writing, some of the features we would like to include like the dynamic mapping of geolocation data as it is added to a site, are not fully implemented.

Biological Taxonomy in the Scratchpads

A key requirement of the Scratchpads that we have been unable to meet until now is the ability to handle biological taxonomic hierarchies of taxon names within a site. Various users have come up with their own solutions to handling names, but in an effort to produces something more robust we have started to play with Drupal's built in taxonomy module. Through this tool you can tag web pages (nodes) on your site around these names and dynamically create taxon pages with new information as it is submitted to the site.

Dynamic scrathpad sites list

As an aid to help us keep track of the new Scratchpads as they go up, Simon Rycroft has written a little script that dynamically pulls the list from the Edit Web Revisions server. We will try to embed a bit more information (like each site's missions statement) in due course. In the unlikely event that you want to keep track of these sites on your own web page, just paste the following into a webpage:

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Scratchpads developed and conceived by: Vince Smith, Simon Rycroft & Dave Roberts