if you note
mistakes in the content or note programming bugs. I will be most grateful.About the history of the Natural History of Iceland Site
This site, dedicated to Iceland's nature, was first setup in 1997. Ever
since, the amount of information contained within this site has been increasing
steadily . It is a large site now. For the
publication of the fourth main version over 3500 files had be written i.e.
rewritten. Since the 5th version of the Natural History of Iceland site the url is www.iceland-nh.net . You can:
if you note
mistakes in the content or note programming bugs. I will be most grateful.
HISTORY
Spring 1997
I was working as an advisor for a scientific
library institution and a publisher on the future of scientific publishing on
Internet. Getting to learn HTML-in one day - was but a side effect. In order to
get some practice I designed a series of web pages on Iceland nature because I
still had the photo's of my 1992 visit shelved and I already planned to visit
Iceland that summer. The first version - a prototype on my hard disk was
born.
Autumn 1997
After visiting Iceland summer 1997, I had a much
more material and version 2 was published on my home page URL. This
publication came about by appending "bit by bit" information and illustrations
I had. My original intention was to build the site around the themes "bird and
plant photography". Because I had some difficulty to make quick progress on
these themes I added a section on landscape photography. Originally it was
intended basically as an additional decoration. But when professor Ed Jackson
contacted me with his decision that he wanted to put my site on his "best list"
on Icelandic Landscape Photography and Paintings collection on his unique site
of URL's I realized that I had to take the landscape photography theme very
serious. Which I have done ever since!
Spring 1999
A third visit to Iceland took place in the
May/June period. I came back with more material and version 3 was
published.
Winter 1999/2000
Please understand, the publishing of versions
is not a one-off event. Small changes and minor appending's to the site take
place all the time after the introduction of a major new version. In the winter
of 1999/2000 however, an important addition to version three was created by
adding Java-based search programs for plants and birds.
Summer 2001
The fourth visit (three weeks stay). The material
is intended to fuse into the version 4.
Autumn 2001
First publication of version 4. As stated
above the whole setup of the site changed in order to give visitors easier and
faster control over which sections of the site they want to open.
Late January/early February 2002
Finally I was satisfied
enough with the version 4 that I decided to present the site to the
Internet community by registering the site to the common search engines (like
GOOGLE, etc.) and inform, those, who had expressed their interest previously,
about the major update. The work is not at all finished though, updates will
follow as the site is far from complete and - as I am human - mistakes have to
be corrected. Also the search-facility to plant and bird species had to be
updated.
April/May 2002
As I was not able to visit Iceland in 2002 I
had time to rewrite basic code configurations for further expansion of this
site.
May 2002 - March 2004
During this period nut much happened. A
few persons added a couple of contributions to version 4. I did not have
much time in further development of the site.
March 2004
Knowing that I was to visit Iceland in summer 2004,
I took a major decision. The site was to move to a new URL (www.iceland-nh.net)
and the design of the site needed to be reconstructed. The reason was that the
popular Google search engine does not direct to framed sites but rather to the
content files within the site. The redesign is now table-based using a few
in-line frames.
March 2004 - Summer 2004
Thousands of files had to be
rewritten........ The prototype of version 5 was born.
In the summer of 2004 I could visit Iceland again and brought home a lot of new material
Autumn 2004 winter 2004-2005
While rewriting the pages for version 5, I was already aware that a table-based lay-out was not the final solution. Already I had been experimenting with CSS. Version 6 was born the very same winter after version 5 appeared in the summer of 2004
2005: disaster
The camara system I used untill then was an old (ancient maybe a better description) Minolta non-autofocus system. After heavy use in Australia, the Netherlands and Iceland it started to fall apart so much that new investment was nescessary. At the time the digital revolution in photogrophy showed clearly this was the future. My local photography store pesuaded me into buying a Konika-Minolta Dynax 7D. Elsewhere I bought a Minolta 2/8-300mmAF minolta lense. The idea was to visit Iceland in 2006. In order to test the new camara system, I took a short holliday in november 2006 to an island off the northcoast of the Netherlands. One rainy day was enough to cause an irreparable breakdown of this camara. Luckily it was very well insured. At the time Nikon prsented the D200 camara and I was immediately interested. Given the fact that I had to completely reinvest in a new system the planned 2006 trip to Iceland had to be canceled.
2006 - may 2007
The new camara system based on the Nikon D200 was tested and showed to be a very fine camara indeed. It took some te to acquire all the nescessary additional accessory parts. In the meanwhile I had been scanning all my Iceland slides (and many others). When I started back in 1997 most people were using 14 inch screens (standard resolution of 640x480pixels) or 15 inch screens (800x600pixel resolution) with slow telephone-modems. Now, almost everyone uses 17 inch screens with a resolution of 1024x768 pixels or more and faster internet connections.
Version 7 was gradually introduced using larger photo's and introducing older material I had ovelooked.