deciphering their diversity and evolutionary history

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Asiloid Flies
deciphering their diversity and evolutionary history

Sample of Asiloid Flies

News - 5 February 2010

5 February, 2010 - 18:52 -- DikowT

A new version of the web-site has been released. This is version 3, which is now using the open source content management system Drupal in order to provide better access to information stored in databases. Not only are the taxa catalogues for family-group names, genera, and species fully searchable, the site itself can also be searched.

The bibliography is presented in a much better way and you can search the bibliography for authors, journals, or just words. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to implement a keyword search that would provide you with every paper dealing with the genus Syllegomydas, for example. Stay tuned as I hope to implement this soon. In addition, when you click on the title of a publication it will either give you the full record or take you directly to a web-site where you can download a free PDF of the article, e.g., Biodiversity Heritage Library, American Museum of Natural History, the journal Psyche, or the electronic edition of the Biologia Centrali-Americana. I will try to add new links from time to time, but it is difficult to keep up with the huge amount of digital media made available online for free.

Another great update is the presentation of specimen occurrence data in a table and map format for both Apioceridae and Mydidae. This database will be updated regularly and eventually provide a great source to see the exact distribution of each species. The image galleries are also provided in an easier-to-navigate way and almost all Mydidae genera are represented by at least one image (often of the holotype of the type species).

Migrating a site from a pure CSS and HTML style to Drupal isn't easy and I thank Kris Urie and Maria Tzeka from the Biodiversity Synthesis Center for their help with all my questions about Drupal.

If you have comments or suggestions, please don't hesitate to e-mail me at torsten at tdvia.de. Enjoy the new site.