It's been less than 3 months since I launched the start of JungleDragon v2, along with its key specie identification feature. I consider it JungleDragon's differentiating feature, a feature to be proud of. I am even more proud however at how the community embraced it. I've developed quite some features that are little used in JungleDragon, but specie identification is not one of them. It's a sport in JungleDragon to identify species on photos or to help others do it.

As a result of this success, we have reached a new milestone: that of 1,000 unique species (1,009 currently to be exact). Combined with a 76% identification rate on photos, that makes for a truly educational link between photos and specie data.

A 1,000 species doesn't sound like that much, but its actually quite a solid base. It's a number that pales against the millions of species known to science, that much is true. Yet, from a practical sense, most species in existence are poorly documented, you unlikely know about them and are unlikely to be looking for them. For example, there are over 30,000 different species of snout beetles. The odds of finding an uncommon one at JungleDragon are poor, yet the most common ones you may be able to find. And that's a reasonable place to be for now. 

Anyway, so celebrate this little milestone, I just made a small donation for the preservation of the Tiger. 

This is a hugely popular book on modern progressive enhancement strategies for web development that I had in my reading backlog for months. It turns out it's only a short read, yet I consider that a compliment. I'm done with 1000-page tech books.

In this book, the author lays out a very pragmatic strategy for building up a website in layers to maximize reach. For example, one starts with building the content using semantic markup, and that content can be experienced on any device, even without any CSS or Javascript support. A secondary layer adds CSS for a better experience. A third layer adds Javascript for better interactivity, and so on. All of these layers enrich the layers below it yet are setup in such a way that they can fail. The concept falls somewhat inline with recent trends of "content first" and "mobile first", both concept I strongly believe in (yet hard to apply afterwards for existing web projects).

Furthermore, the author makes some really good points on how a similar strategy (graceful degradation) is actually not that similar, and in general a bad strategy to follow. A nice eye opener.

As I have read some related books and follow several web design blogs, few techniques were completely new to me, yet the sum of it all still makes this a worthy read. Recommended reading, unless you have digested these strategies already from similar books.

The image you see above is a JungleDragon embedded photo, the first one ever published. I've been longing to implement this for a long time and today I finally got to it. Here's how it works...

Photo pages now have a new Embed button, right next to the social sharing widget:

If the owner of the image has photo embedding disabled, this button will not be visible. More on that in a minute. Clicking the embed button takes you to this screen:

From here, you can select from 3 image sizes using the tabs. Just select the size you would like to see embedded. As you can see, I have limited the selection to thumb size formats. The idea is that the embedded photo leads to a click to see it larger within JungleDragon.

The second part of the screen shows the embed code. The first one is the HTML embed code. If you have your own website or blog, you can simply copy and paste that code. The example at the start of this blog entry is embedded this way. 

The second embed code is in the BB format, which is often used at forums on the web. Here's an example of a JungleDragon image embedded in a forum based on phpBB:

Again, it's just a matter of selecting the preferred size and copying and pasting the embed code that fits your needs. 

JungleDragon values the copyrights of photo owners greatly, therefore, should you not wish to see your photos embedded this way, you can disable it using a new setting on your profile:

By default, embedding is disabled.

Spread the love

Do you have a website, blog or participate in a forum? I highly encourage you to embed JungleDragon photos in it, where it makes sense. And of course, there are the existing ways to share JungleDragon content on social networks. Let's build a JungleDragon web!

If you'd ask me what JungleDragon's most important feature is, it would be specie identification (and as a result, specie browsing). It has changed JungleDragon as a whole, lifting it from a niche photo sharing site focusing on wildlife, to a deeper experience where photos have context and users actually learn about wildlife. And sometimes it goes beyond that. Specie identification has not only changed the site, it has also changed people. Some users report that they go about their nature walks and photography different then before. They've developed  knowledge about species and a hunger to know what they are photographing. I consider this behavioral change to be the ultimate compliment to JungleDragon.

So it is evident that species are crucial in JungleDragon, and for this we have the specie engine. It's a complicated piece of software that basically takes unstructured specie information from Wikipedia and attempts to put it intro structured JungleDragon specie entities so that they can be linked to photos. Once that is done, species can be further extended in JungleDragon by adding videos and a geomap.

In practice, the process of specie identification is not perfect, but still pretty good. In about 5-10% of all cases the identification of a new specie results in a blocking error, where the entire identification fails. I continually look for the source of these problems and try to patch the specie engine so that it does not fail for similar cases in the future. 

The other 90% leads to a succesful specie identification. Yet, this category is still not problem free. In about 20 to 30% of these cases, there are (slight) data problems. For example, the taxonomy may not be complete. That means it will not appear correctly in the specie hierarchy (link). Another common problem is malformed data, that contains unexpected characters due to small errors in the parsing of Wiki markup. Those are not really an issue other than looking ugly. And finally, it may be that nothing fails yet Wikipedia simply does not have specific data.

All in all, this means that the specie engine requires manual data corrections. The effort to do so is manageable, but the process to do it has been nasty so far.  I'm using phpMyAdmin to fire manual queries to various tables. Not anymore though. As of now, JungleDragon admins (me) see an edit link below each specie page:

Clicking that link leads to the obvious specie edit form:

From this single screen, I can manage all specie data. Having a friendly UI like this greatly simplifies specie maintenance, which benefits both me and the community.

Just hand over your life and its free!

If you've ever done any serious CSS styling you will know that the above illustration is the box model. A basic explanation is that for block elements (meaning elements that are not inline), you can apply a width, say 200px. Yet, as you add padding, borders and margins to that elements, the total width of the element increases. 

In many cases, this box model is very counter intuitive and counter productive. Say you'd have a two column layout of 600px and 300px respectively. You will want to add some padding to the text in these columns, but as a result the column widths (and heights) grow. So to avoid that, you substract the padding from the column, and likewise you need to do so for any border or margin you may add.

The problem becomes even worse when you use percentage widths. On percentage width containers, you will often want pixel based padding, not percentage based padding, yet you cant mix these units. Simply put, if you want a box to be 200px it should be 200px. Padding, borders and margins should be subtracted not added. 

Anyway, to cut a long story short. Paul Irish (a front-end development pioneer) has a great tip on making the box model behave like you would intuitively expect it to, and this is all it takes:

/* apply a natural box layout model to all elements */
* { -moz-box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; box-sizing: border-box; }

This will definitely be in my CSS reset rules to be used on new projects. 

Finally, the irony of this tip is that before the rise of standards-compliant browsers, back when IE6 ruled the world, this "natural box layout model" was how the box model worked in IE. The standards movement introduced the clumsy box model and now we have a standards-compliant way to return to the intuitive model, which (double irony) doesn't work in IE6 and 7. 

(photo by Wendy)

Less than a month ago, I released World of Wildlife, a fun, simple, visual and educational way to browse the wildlife available at JungleDragon. Today I'm adding a small, yet important improvement...

World of Wildlife allows one to browse through wildlife, so let us browse to Elephants. This would be the navigation path:

Animals -> Vertebrates -> Mammals -> Elephants

And the result would look like this:

Below the filter you notice 3 entries, representing the 3 elephant species known to JungleDragon. You can click one to learn about that particular elephant specie, check out photos, videos and a geomap. 

Note though that I added a new tab control. Right now it's on "Species", but we can easily switch to "Photos":

As you can see, there are more photos than specie entries, since some specie entries have more than one photo. This new way of photo browsing is quite powerful as you can use it on every level of the tree. It's now also very easy to link to all photos of a specie group, something that before was only possible using tags (which are unreliable).

When you upload a photo to JungleDragon, the original file is stored untouched, in full quality, with EXIF and IPTC data included. In addition, JungleDragon cuts out 5 extra formats for display on various pages, of which you see 4 in the above composition.

Up until today, each of these additional image formats would also have the EXIF and IPTC data included. The combination of EXIF and IPTC data takes an absolute amount of space, no matter the size of the format. In this example, it takes 11KB. For the larger format seen here, it is 11KB of about 250KB, a seemingly reasonable portion of the file. However, as image formats get smaller, the portion of EXIF/IPTC data compared to the total image size becomes questionable. The smallest thumb seen here is 20KB, of which 11KB is EXIF/IPTC data...more than half the image size is unneeded data!

As the original file has all EXIF/IPTC data included, and I store a copy of it in my database anyway, there really is no use in persisting this data in the smaller formats. So for new images I strip this data, which only took a single line of code:

$imagick->stripImage();

On some pages, this is a significant saving. For example the homepage has 24 small thumbs. Assuming most photos would have EXIF/IPTC data included, this saves 200-250KB of page weight whilst not sacrificing any functionality at all. I blame myself for overlooking this improvement earlier, but better late than never.

JungleDragon has various types of users: viewers, casual uploaders, people who mostly post feedback, and more. There is however a small group of users that go the extra mile: they frequently donate their time and knowledge to JungleDragon to make it better. Especially for those users, JungleDragon now has an extended reward system: medals.

There are 10 medals to be earned and you can earn each medal multiple times. For example, the "photographer" medal is earned for every 100 photos shared. Here is the list of medals that can be earned:

• Photographer (based on #photos shared)
• Videographer (based on #videos added to specie pages)
• Pioneer (based on #first photo of a specie not yet known to JungleDragon)
• Scientist (based on #specie identifications)
• Geotagger (based on #photo geotagged)
• Socializer (based on #photo comments and forum posts)
• Collector (based on #lists created)
• Marketeer (based on #of pages shared on social networks)
• Loyalist (based on length of active membership)
• Philanthropist (based on number of hi-res photos shared)

The list of medals with full details and tresholds on when you earn one can be found here.

How it works

Medals are awarded automatically by JungleDragon based on your activity. Important to know though is that you need to trigger it once. For example, if you have shared 320 photos, you should earn the "photographer" medal 3 times. However, this will be calculated the next time you upload another photo. 

Once you earned a medal, it will be visible in the activity stream for all to see:

You will also get an email notification, unless you have disabled it:

And most importantly, your medals are permanently visible on your user profile:

As you can see, they have a rather basic visualization. Not to worry though, I have hired a professional illustrator to make unique illustrations for each medal, making them much more desirable. It will be a few weeks before they are ready.

With these medals, I would like to reward the most active members, who are doing great volunteer work. Note that this new system works on top of the already available systems to recognize users for good content and work:

• The homepage that showcases featured photos of members
• World of Wildlife, which has thousands of specie categories for which the best member photo is selected
• The class system, which places members in a foodchain

All in all, there should now be plenty of incentives to be recognized in the community. I've learned this to be a crucial aspect of a photo community, so let's hope it works :)

Other improvements

A few other small improvements deployed:

• If you include keywords in your exif, these will be converted to tags in JungleDragon automatically. The maximum amount of keywords that will be converted has been raised from 10 to 20.
• JungleDragon even uses your exif keywords to automatically match it to a specie. However, if this for some reason failed, it blocked the entire upload. This is fixed now.
• After upload when you manually identify a specie on the photo, occassionally the specie engine would result in an error. However, the modal dialog would appear as if it is still searching, whilst the error already occurred. This is now fixed. If the specie parsing results in an error, it will be immediate.

Cheers!

It's been two weeks since I've entered the world of macro photography. Hereby I want to share some early lessons and thoughts.

• For long I have been skeptical whether macro photography was my cup of tea. I was wrong. It is tons of fun.
• I was prepared for macro photography being hard. It's not point and shoot. In normal photography, with luck and only basic skills you can get good results, this is much less the case with macro photography. 
• The key challenge and skill to master is to focus correctly, meaning the subject is in focus and in focus entirely, not partly. When shooting from hand, even as much as breathing takes a subject out of focus because of the very narrow depth of field. The other problem is your subject moving, by itself or the wind, even the tiniest movement means a ruined photo. This is my main lesson so far. Master this problem and you master macro photography.
• Contrary to common advise, I shoot macro from hand, without a tripod. For several reasons. I am finding ways to cope with the focus problem though. For one, I switch to manual focus. The other key trick I use is to move my body much like rocking a chair, feet firmly planted whilst leaning backwards and forwards in a very tiny movement. Somewhere within this small movement is the perfect focal point, and by simply shooting a lot there is a fairly large chance you got it. If not, try again. It works reasonably well. Check out this sample of a spider only 2mm in length, about the smallest one can capture using most gear. It's shot from hand and is within reasonable focus consider how tiny it is and how the wind was moving the spider considerably. To me this proves that macro photography from hand is viable, not easy, but possible. A valuable lesson.
• The lens I invested in was expensive, but a good investment nevertheless. It has an excellent performance both for macro and portrait photography. It will keep most of its value if I ever should sell it. I'm also happy to have chosen for a 105mm model, as this gives a much needed working distance between you and your subject, particularly needed for insects.
• As a personal preference, I don't like staging macro scenes by killing insects, slowing them down or repositioning them. If they're not where I want them to be, that's my problem, it shouldn't be the bug's problem. I don't have an ethical problem with killing insects, it's just that I prefer purity of a scene. I am not entirely consistent, as I do enjoy post processing macro shots to make them more interesting.
• One of the most fun parts of macro is that there is a wealth of opportunities everywhere. Living in a crowded, heavily industrialized country like the Netherlands, only a dedicated visit to a hotspot or park brings opportunities for interesting wildlife. This is not true for macro photography. Even in our small garden there are daily opportunities and new discoveries.
• And that's what I do. Once or twice a day I walk into our garden. Almost every time I do so, I notice a new bug or detail to learn about. On a side note, it is entertaining that my neighbours stop what they are doing outside when they hear the shutter sound. They must think I'm a creep stalking them. I shall not tell them I'm photographing bugs, and keep this myth alive. Just because its funny.
• The other cool part of macro photography is that changing/recomposing a scene is easy. Say I'd see an interesting bird several yards away, yet I'm shooting against the light. Recomposing to have better light conditions is hard or a lot of work. I'd have to circle the bird without chasing it away. Perhaps it is across a river and I can't. In macro photography you're only one step away from an entirely different perspective and scene. The same is true for an interesting bokeh. In normal photography you're pretty much stuck with whatever is behind your subject. In macro photography, a slight change of angle changes the bokeh dramatically.
• The final observation I would like to make is that macro photography changes your view on the small world. Not only are you more aware of it, you also learn to respect it more.

Anyways, those are my early thoughts on macro photography. I'm documenting my learning path using a JungleDragon slideshow. It's full of beginner material but one has to start somewhere.