BirdLife International published in the last update of IUCN redlist for birds that Alaotra Grebe (Tachybaptus rufolavatus) is now considered extinct. This species was endemic to the lake Alaotra in Madagascar. The last observation was done in 1985. You can read more at BirdLife as well as on Wikipedia.
GBIF has 30 specimens in its database.
Alaotra Grebe · Biodiversity · IUCN · Madagascar · Tachybaptus rufolavatus
A simple update of an old wallpaper, but this time platform agnostic and adapted to bigger screen.
A lot of work has been done lately to improve geo:truc.
There is at this point no new feature, no, the work has been to make it faster by reducing the size of the different components (HTML, javascript, CSS), by using compression and by using CSS-sprites.
The size of the text files was reduced by optimizing the code and by trying to write it in a more compact way (less new lines etc).
The flags on the top of the frontpage were already sprites, but I generalized this use. The point is that only one image file is downloaded once instead of a lot of small ones (one for the logo, one per icon etc). This avoids to make a lot of calls to the server with a an extra response time per request.
If anything is wrong in the layout, try a reload or to clean your cache.
Enjoy now a faster geo:truc!
CSS · geo:truc · Neogeography
I have been very quiet on the blogging front those last months, but geo:truc has continued to be developped.
Here is the MySQL function to use to get the current datetime as ISO 8601 format as asked in DarwinCore:
DATE_FORMAT(NOW(),'%Y-%m-%dT%TZ')
DATE_FORMAT() is obviously a function for formatting date and time, and we are using here %Y for four-digit year, %m for two-digits month, %d for two-digits day and %T for 24-hour time (hh:mm:ss). NOW() gives the current datetime.
And then you get a nice figure like this one:
2009-06-10T07:43:12Z
Note that the same result can be achieved with:
CONCAT(CURDATE(),'T',CURTIME(),'Z')
Where CONCAT() is used for concatenating strings, and CURDATE() and CURTIME() give respectively the current date and the current time.
DarwinCore · Datetime · GBIF · ISO 8601 · MySQL · SQL · TDWG · Tutorial
