Upcoming changes on ZooBeat

Upcoming changes on ZooBeat
03-10-2008

Hi all,

I've been very busy of late - but I did manage to take a couple of days off with my wife and flew down to Melbourne for a bit of a holiday. I also had a quick business trip to Adelaide that same week - so over a period of 7 days I managed to visit:

• Adelaide Zoo
• Monarto Zoo
• Werribee Open Range Zoo
• Healesville Sanctuary
• Melbourne Zoo
• Mlebourne Aquarium

... I took the camera with both the zoom lens and the wide angle lens and focused more on taking photos of the enclosures and zoo features than on the animals themselves - I haven't had a chance to upload them yet, but I'll try and get to that shortly!

Anyway, I wanted to give you all advance warning of some changes that are about to happen here at ZooBeat in the next few weeks.

First of all - our 5th birthday is coming up on the 19th of this month (yay!), and on that day (assuming I get myself organised in time), I will be relocating the site to a server in the US (it is currently hosted in Australia), which should mean much faster performance for everyone outside Australia and New Zealand - and hopefully only a very slight slow down for those of us down-under!

Secondly, I will be re-designing the overall layout of the site a bit. This is mostly a cosmetic change and won't change the way the site functions (other than adding a new home page separate to the forum pages).

Thirdly, I will make some slight changes to the layout of the photo gallery with the goal of making it easier to navigate and locate photos. This will mostly be cosmetic - the photos will all be there still, I just want to improve the way that part of the site looks and works.

Finally, I will be changing the name of the site!

Yes, from the 19th of this month, ZooBeat will known as ZooChat - ZooChat

I won't go into full details in public about why the name is changing - but to summarise, there is an issue with the name ZooBeat (mostly only affecting Australian users - and nothing to do with Adrian Simpson), and to avoid potential problems in the future, I decided it was time to change the name.

I know most of you are quite fond of the name, and so was I originally - until I discovered the issue I previously mentioned. Since then I have been a bit uncomfortable with using the name, so I acquired the zoochat.com domain and will be moving the site as part of the relocation of the servers to the US.

The old zoobeat.com domain will still work in the future - it will just redirect you to the new site, so you won't have to change your bookmarks if you don't want to!

What does this really mean for the site? Not much at all - the same discussion, the same photo gallery, the same maps, the same users. Everything will be moved across - and most things should work exactly the same way as before.

I don't want you to be afraid of this change - I know it is a pretty big move ... but I really hope this will serve us all well moving forwards and will allow the site to become bigger and better than ever.

PS. when I get the chance down the track, I'm hoping to build in a new video gallery feature which will allow people to upload videos from zoos (in a much nicer way than the photo gallery currently allows). But that will take a while - quite a bit of programming involved to make that work! I'm pretty excited by the possibilities there!

03-10-2008

Wow, I'm really excited and can't wait for the new changes to come.

03-10-2008

The name is nice, but the discussions and the community are what's special!

03-10-2008

here here.

Wow busy time ahead then.

03-10-2008

I'm excited for the changes, and anticipate a growing base of zoo fanatics. I'm also impressed that Sim managed to hit 6 zoos in 7 days, and hopefully the zoo exhibit shots will be worthy additions to this extraordinary site. Bring on ZooChat!

03-10-2008

Yay!I really like the new name,my mom thought the name Zoobeat sounded perverted a little bit but I liked it.Will this mean we will have to start new threads?

03-10-2008

Nope - everything will be moved across and will work the same way as it does now.

10-10-2008

Hi Sim,

Working overtime I suppose on the site?

When will be changes be effective provisionally?

Cheers + keep up the good work!

Jelle



P.S. Any chance of a report on your epic zoo journey across Oz?

10-10-2008

Yes - been hard at it for a few days now ... coming together nicely.

I hope to have most of the work done in the next few days - go live will be the 19th of this month.

Yes - but I want to get the rest of this work done first.

10-10-2008

Will the changes to the gallery also be effective when the new site opens?

10-10-2008

Yes - that is the plan, but this is also the part that will require the most work (due to the complexity of the gallery software), so if it ends up taking me longer than I had hoped, I may end up launching the new site before I've finished the gallery upgrades, and then fixing them later.

We'll see how things go.

10-10-2008

This seems exciting plus with everything moved across we won't have to worry if past members changed there names,

11-10-2008

I'm not sure I follow what you're saying

11-10-2008

I meant like since everything is getting carried a across there won't be any hassle trying to find everyone again... I'm sure a lot of members would change their display name if this wasn't the case...

15-10-2008

Just a quick update - I've upgraded the photo gallery to the latest version of the software in preparation for the changes I'm going to make with the launch of the new site.

Sorry it took so long to get it back online - as part of the upgrade process, some of the modifications I'd previously made had to be removed, so I've had to spend a bit of time "repairing" the gallery to something closer to what we had before.

Even so, the interface may look slightly different to what you are used to. This is just a temporary thing until I get the new photo gallery interface finished ready for the new site.