User talk:Snakesteuben

Welcome!
Welcome, Snakesteuben!

Come introduce yourself at the new users page. If you have any questions, you can ask there or contact me personally.--AdRiley (talk) 10:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Bird id template
Hi Snakesteuben,

I think you are probably right about the changes you have suggested to Template:Bird id. The reason I had done it the way I did was so that I could transclude each bird page into multiple works without worrying about the header level. In other words, I wanted to do something like this:

Subsection
And not have to worry about how the ==Description== would mess up the parent work. However - I later decided that the book I wanted to include these in should rather just refer the reader to the Field Guide instead. There is still a huge clean-up job that needs to be done as a result of the way I started - these pages were originally part of Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book/Nature/Birds, so all the pages have that as a prefix. They all need to be moved. Maybe we could get one of the bots to do that.

There were a lot of things I wanted to do with the template that I didn't know how to do, and if I had to do it all over again, I'm sure I would have done it differently. For example, instead of using the tables, I think I'd just use galleries. When I put the template together I didn't know galleries could do all the things they can do. I had thought that galleries were limited to 4 images per row, 180px wide, but that's not the case:

Hmmm... maybe there's a way to make the pictures wider rather than just the picture containers wider. CSS?

Another thing I would absolutely do is name each page according to the bird's binomial name. And since binomial names are unique to each kingdom (afaik), it might be good to prefix each page name with the kingdom name, a la Field Guide/Animalia/Cyanocitta cristata.

There are a LOT of other things that could be done with categories and DPL's (Dynamic Page Lists (? can't remember what the L stands for)) that would help in creating a key. The Bloom Clock project is a good example of this.

I am really delighted that someone else has taken an interest in the field guides BTW. I don't think anyone has touched them in about a year (maybe more), so as far as I'm concerned, you have a free hand to make changes. There is a lot of room for improvement, so I urge you to experiment. --Jomegat (talk) 12:15, 20 June 2008 (UTC)


 * One other thing... maybe the best way to approach experimentation would be to copy the template into a different one - perhaps calling it "Avian id", and making the changes there. Once that's looking decent enough we could move it over the top of the bird id template, or just edit each page that uses the old one.  This approach would keep the existing stuff intact while we/you are in the middle of the major overhaul. --Jomegat (talk) 12:19, 20 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I found that using galleries within templates is not as easy as I had hoped. I made some changes to a similar template and got some help from User:Darklama.  Unfortunately, it looks like it might not be possible to resize the images in a gallery made within a template.  It also looks like we're stuck with 4 images per row.  But even with those limitations, I think using the galleries in the bird id template would still be better as it eliminates the empty picture boxes.  I don't think the gallery can be placed inside a table though, but I think that's OK.  Let me know what you think. --Jomegat (talk) 13:18, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Field Guide
Hi Snakesteuben,

I think we should add a field to the bird id template for synonyms, so that we can list alternate/deprecated binomial names. Then we an create redirects.

As it turns out, it's not as easy to add galleries to templates as I thought it would be. User:Darklama helped me out a bit with that in the Template:Animal sign template. So far it looks like we cannot resize the images and are stuck with four per row at the default (tiny) size.

--Jomegat (talk) 14:30, 20 July 2008 (UTC)