The last little while I’ve been working on revamping my eBirdsearch.org site. There are a few new features in the works: mobile support, searching notable sightings, linking to returned data sets for easy sharing of information and listing hotpots (popular birding locations) in a region.

Even though ebirdsearch.org is by far my least popular open source project, I’m still delighted by the damn thing! I check it daily to see what’s been seen in my area, what birds are found each month – and whenever I travel outside of my usual birding zone, it’s an invaluable resource to find new places to bird. So despite it’s unpopularity, I think it’s worth investing more time and effort.

The new version is completely refactored. It wasn’t a particularly big script, but the code had already gotten pretty unwieldly. The new version is modularized using requireJS and underscore for client-side templating. It’s much better now (albeit admittedly a little over-engineered at this stage).

btw, this weekend I’ll also be releasing a new generatedata.com version – I’ve had some pull requests that need to be rolled out.

I’ve been spinning my wheels with the eBirdsearch.org update, so I’m going to take a break and return to generatedata.com for a little while. For some reason, the code just won’t behave…! I can’t seem to find a good way to structure the codebase so I think I need to look at something else for a bit.

Just a heads up.

There are a few changes coming to eBirdsearch.org – it’s been tricky finding decent blocks of time to work on the script, but I should get all tomorrow.

The next version will include two new important features.

• mobile support. It’s working right now, but not as well as I’d hoped. There are so many varieties of mobile device to support, it’s proving a real headache getting it working across the board.
• Notable vs. All observation searching. This is a new feature – it limits the search results to only observations flagged as “notable” in the eBird database.

Coming soon. :)

[EDIT: Yuck. I'm going to restructure the code to all use AMD and requireJS. It's only 1500 or so lines, but it's already getting out of control. This should greatly improve code intelligibility.]

I just released the first version of eBirdsearch.org – check it out!

I created eBirdsearch.org to fill what I regard as a rather conspicuous gap in the functionality of the amazing eBird.org site.

If you haven’t discovered eBird yet, do so now. It’s an incredible resource and tool for birders, ornithologists, educators – anyone interested in birds. Birders around the world submit millions of observations a year to eBird, providing a wealth of information for viewing and analysis. The more people use it, the better it becomes.

The problem is, the search functionality currently available through eBird is fairly limited. As a birder, I wanted a clear and high-level overview of a region: where are the popular hotspots? What locations yield the most birds? Which are most common? This site attempts to help plug that gap.

All the code for this site is open source and free for anyone to download and play with. I’ve endeavoured to keep the number of data requests to eBird’s site to a minimum so it doesn’t put too much of a stress on their servers, but if it does, they’re entirely within their rights to ask me to take the site down. Hopefully it won’t come to that. I very much hope that one day this sort of functionality will be available directly through eBird, but in the meantime I’ll try to keep the site up and running.