After my decision to keep my website active even though I am not directly using it for Frantic Naturalist Tours and Safaris, I have been busy. I have been frantically banging out a new website at www.frantic-naturalist.com
It has been really fun. The main thing is to create a directory of nature oriented tour companies from around the world. I have only had a few submissions so far, but I am working on it, and I think eventually it will grow a bit faster.
I am also building various other things into it. I have put in a Namibia page, which I can add to as I fancy or learn new and interesting things. You can certainly expect some birding stuff and Sossusvlei stuff to creep in there.
I am typing up my whole birding life list. I don't know if anyone will ever read it, but it's sort of fun to do, and my be interesting to take a wonder through if you know your southern African birds. You can view my progress so far at www.frantic-naturalist.com/life_list.htm.
It's actually an emotional thing to do that. I have been keeping my life list since 26 October 1995. It's a fair chuck of my life, and I can follow it along with my birding notes. I am sure that at some stage I will write it up as a story.
I so enjoy the whole process of putting together a website like this. It's a real labor of love. I haven't had much sleep recently.
I wrote most of the website out in Notepad (the Windows ascii text editor.) So I am typing it in raw html. I think I will still play a lot with the css and so on. I have mainly focused on content so far. I will never put to many pics on. It's just not how I like to do websites.
I am building it at a mad pace. If you visit the site, please, please, please, send me some comments (here or email) on what you think, spelling errors, submissions for other companies I should include, links to your site if you think it will be of use to users of my site, and stuff like that. Thanks.
I have been working away at doing the W3C validator, and have managed to validate my whole site (bar the bird list page, I'll get to that later.) I did it with xhtml strict, so it's good. It may take some fiddling, but hey, that's the fun of the whole thing. I have tested it in Internet Explorer (don't like it to much - the browser, not my website,) Opera (just tried Opera for the first time, just to check it out,) Chrome (I am a big Chrome fan since it came out,) and Mozilla (my old love, cast aside by Chrome.) I also had Safari on another Laptop, but someone pinched it a couple days ago. They got a sorry deal. We got the computer form my mom after it's screen started to freak out. Then my kids decided to start pulling the keys off. It's a mess. It's moved on to torture some unfortunate thief.
The best part of my little project has been wondering the internet and finding like minded souls, the strange, passionate naturalists of the world. Most of them are not geeks (I'm only a little bit geeky, but for a nature boy, it counts) like me, so hopefully for the less internet addicted this whole project is of some use.
I have been running around in between, doing a lot of birding and also exploring the desert a bit. It hasn't been much to blog about yet, but I am getting to know this area more and more intimately, in prep for doing very focussed birding and nature oriented day tours this year. Come and visit Swakopmund later in the year, and I will certainly have lots to show you! Share this post
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