Please contact Jim Steele or Paul Shaw for support – we will do what we can.

Jim/Paul

Next month its our 2nd birthday, so make sure you subscribe to the newsletter before the end of the month or you may miss some special birthday treats.

We hope to extend the functionality in the future to allow people to look up posts via a map. Watch this space!

Contributors to the site can use this functionality when they write a post by scrolling down to the new “map meta box” when they write the article. Tick the “Dispay Map on Post” option and drag the marker to where the sightings are from, zooming in or out to an appropriate scale – then hit the “Use” button to use that info. The map will show on your post once its published.

We hope this functionality will allow less frequent visitors to see where places are. It still in development, so I hope lots of new features can be added in future.

• New Look Site - obviously the biggest change is the style of the site, the new black background is designed to show off those photos, and the featured post slideshow will be used to highlight articles to everyone on the front page.
• Latest Photo Article Thumnails – take a look at the bottom of the front page or the biopedia and you will see the latest articles listed with their photos (I’ll try and remove the tiled effect), hover over them to see a quick excerpt of the content.
• New Header Menu – the new header menu will give quick access to the new social functions on the site and other commonly used features.
• Recent Activity - look under the community menu header and you will see the Activity option.  this is a quick way to see all the recent activity on the site in one glance.
• Status Updates – From the Activity page a Facebook style “status” can be used to quickly tell others what you’re doing or where you’ve been, or some quick news about sightings.
• User Albums – Each user now has an Album page accessible from the top menu (My Account -> Album) so you can quickly upload individual photos, other users will be able to comment on your photos if you wish.
• Groups and Group Forums – Will this be a good addition, its something I’m not sure on. I’ve created a few groups with easy to use discussion forums, so users can quickly post and get peoples opinions on topics that aren’t suitable for a new article.
• Friendships – another feature I’m still testing the usefulness of, but you can add friends and quickly see their most recent activity at the click of a button, useful for when the community gets into the thousands.
• New Advanced Profile – Update your profile to let people know about yourself and what interests you. You can also upload an avatar (image of yourself) without needing a Gravatar (My Account -> Profile -> Change Avatar)
• Private Messaging – This is now more integrated into the above features. You will be notified of new messages  when you log into the site on the menu bar.
• New Media Uploader – those of you who submit articles will find the new functionality useful, in the old place where you uploaded images you can now drag and drop images directly into the upload screen to add them.

and all the old pages and functionality is all still there!

Explore and enjoy the new functionality. I started a new forum post in the new groups where you can let me know what you think. See if you can find it and let me know what you think

Therefore, using some time off this afternoon, I’ve had a quick play and come up with the new theme. There is still work to do, as you can see, but I’m quite pleased with the result. Please let me know what you think.

We can switch back to the old theme at any point if people preferred it.

For contributors to the site then please be aware that if your post includes a photo it would be great if you could set one of them to the  Featured Photo (you can do this from the same bit as you add them to a post). This image will then be used in all the links etc.

Thanks,

Chris

(webmaster)

I have emailed everyone who wanted a calendar, only a few days to order. If you don’t have an email from me and want a calendar then let me know asap and I’ll contact you. Thanks to all those who have already got back to me.

To preview the use the following link for the £10 Truprint one…..(half shown price using a code), you will have to create a truprint account to view it, but this is free. I will order in bulk to save delivery, unless you particularly want to order yourself.

http://www3.truprint.co.uk/truprint/projectshareewelcome/l=613216029/p=548301322689195608/g=2496254029/cobrandOid=1082851/COBRAND_NAME=truprint/otsc=SYE/otsi=SPBKlink/

The photobox ones I can’t share, but they have a much more customizable layouts, here are a few screenshots (ignore the boxes round the rectangles). Unfortunately at £18 you have to pay for the better quality.

Over time our membership has grown, we get over 500 people visit the site each month, and have at least ten regularly contribute, with people inquiring more and more frequently about how they can get involved.

So its time for you to have your say, how can we improve the site and community. Please, please take 5 mins of your day to contribute to this survey and hopefully we can improve the site together to turn it into something everyone benefits from.

Click here to take survey

Any problems let me know using the comments below.

NB – the survey has three pages and ten questions. I’ve noticed some people have only got to page 1 or page 2 then stopped answering the questions. Just click next at the bottom of each survey page to continue to the next page.

You can view the other finalists here…

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/photo/mammal-photos-2011#cr

I’m also pleased to say a friend of mine who I’ve been giving a bit of advice to, Olie Horton, has got an image through to the final of the under 16′s. Well done Olie!!

Once again a big thank you to everyone for the great comments and for keeping the standard of photography on the site high. Here’s the shot I took.

Cheers

Paul

There were 17 highly commended shots chosen out of over 2000 entries so I’m pretty pleased with that. You can see the others here.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/photo/wildlife-photography-photos.html#cr

There are still the winners to announce and although I’m not holding my breathe I did enter a few more.

This comp. is probably a step under the likes of UK wildlife photographer and Veolia Environmental but is still a fairly major one so thanks to all who continue to support my photographic efforts. This one’s for all of us love the Erewash Valley!!

Cheers

Paul