About WildlifeNearYou
Hello there! So you’re interested in who we are and how this site came to be. I hope you’re sitting comfortably, and we’ll tell you…
WildlifeNearYou was born out of a passion for zoos, nature reserves, and wonder and awe at the vast amount of amazing creatures that inhabit our beloved planet. Zoos and other wildlife places offer an accessible, amazing opportunity to learn about a wide range of fascinating creatures and a chance to raise awareness about why we should all care about their future.
We imagined a future where there was a place on the internet that contained all the information in one place about these places, and allowed us to easily find our nearest zoo that housed monkeys, owls or narwhals. These are our favourite creatures, we love them a lot. We then dreamed that the site would be community driven so that we could share our trips to the zoo and hopefully have a good read of other people’s ventures too.
We conceived and turned this dream into reality in just one week* as part of /dev/fort on Fort Clonque on Alderney, with the following team of incredibly talented good friends:
James Aylett
Richard Boulton
Natalie Downe
Matt Harris
Chris Lamb
Cindy Li
Niqui Merret
Mazz Mosley
Ben Phillips
Aaron Sokoloski
Matthew Somerville
Simon Willison
We really hope you have as much fun using it as we did building it, and that it inspires you to take a fantastic trip to a zoo; just don’t forget to drop by and tell us all about it – we’d love to hear it!
Technical colophon
Our species list comes from Freebase. Maps and geocoding are powered by the Google Maps API. Icons and country flags are by Mark James, and larger icons are provided by FatCow Hosting.
Our Wikipedia extracts were imported using DBPedia, and RSPB Bird Guide extracts come from the RSPB.
Photos are imported from Flickr using the FlickrAPI Python library.
Search is powered by Xapian, using a client-server system written by Richard Boulton (one of the WildlifeNearYou team members) that was the precursor to the Flax Search Service. Our OpenID implementation uses the python-openid and django-openid libraries.
Our Best Photo voting feature is powered by Redis.
Deployment uses mod_wsgi running on Apache 2 behind an nginx proxy. Our database is MySQL, and database migrations are managed by dmigrations. The site is hosted on a Linode virtual machine and is deployed using the wonderful combination of pip, virtualenv, rsync and Fabric.
WildlifeNearYou is written in Python using the Django Web Framework.
* And 14 months of "just a few more tweaks, honest!" when we got home...