Smashing Magazine tweeted about generatedata.com yesterday:

Pity Dreamhost wasn’t up for the challenge, apparently the site went down for a bit. I really need to find a better hosting provider…

The last month or two I’ve been revising ebirdsearch.org, and today I’m very pleased to announce its successor: birdsearch.org.

Other than being rebranded at the new domain, I also added a number of nice new features:

• In addition to searching bird sightings, you can now also search notable sightings. Notable sightings are those that are flagged as unusual in a particular region and date. For birders, this is often the most useful and interesting information to learn about.
• The tool now also lets you search for popular birding locations, and has the option to limit those results to locations that have had recent sightings (1-30 days).
• Multi-language support. Right now, only English, French, German and Spanish.

I still have a long laundry list of features I want to add (like mobile support…!) but thought I’d release it now that this milestone was reached.

The entire codebase is found on github, here. Feel free to fork the project and do whatever you’d like with the code.

Check it out! :)

It took a little longer than expected, but I just released v3.0.6, which includes some contributed code by Andre Fortin (thanks, Andre!) for a new Costa Rica Country plugin and a new Phone-Regional Data Type that generates a phone number in an appropriate format for the row. Very nice additions, both of them.

I also ended up re-designing the Country plugin classes a bit to make them more future-extensible. Now, rather than loading up the class with new member vars every time a new country-region-specific data item gets added, it’s stored in a generic $extendedData private member var. Should keep things lean and mean, going forward.

Visit the website.