Archive for July, 2009

Planned Server Downtime on 2009-07-11

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

On June 11 at 9:30 a.m. EDT (UTC: 2009-07-11 at 13:30) we will be taking the main Birdstack server down for up to 3 hours in order to perform routine maintenance and upgrades. That means there will be no way to access the site during this time, and your stacks will not load on other websites. We’ll do our best to get it back up as quickly as possible (hopefully less than three hours).

These upgrades will help pave the way for some new features we hope to launch in the next couple months.  Stay tuned!

Update: Upgrade complete!  Turns out my 3 hour estimate was way too high; the process took a little less that an hour.

Taxonomy upgrade to IOC 2.1

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

We’ve just finished updating the Birdstack database to conform with version 2.1 of the IOC’s world bird list. If your data was affected by any splits or lumps, you will have a notification. For help with the upgrade process, check the taxonomic updates help page and the taxonomic updates screencast.

Version 2.1 contains 10,340 species classified in 39 orders, 224 families and 2198 genera. Highlights include addition of 14 species, including eight albatross species, and 19 English name changes including the Madeiracrest to Madeira Firecrest and Pediunker to Grey Petrel.

You can explore further at WorldBirdNames.org.