Just a little information about how this site is put together.
When I first started this site in 1998, most of the images were created by recording on Hi8 video and capturing as a still image using a video capture card.
As the site progressed, so my dissatisfaction with the image quality grew. Most of my recent shots are taken with a 35mm camera (Nikon FE), using either a 100mm macro or 50mm standard lens and a selection of extension tubes. I try to use natural light where possible, and this often means an exposure of up to 8 seconds at F22. Some of the smaller micro moths are photographed with the 50mm lens 'stacked' in reverse on the front of the 100mm macro. This can give excellent results, but needs some care to avoid 'vignetting'.
Nowadays I generally use Fuji Velvia 50ASA slide film, and scan to the PC using a Nikon Coolscan II transparency scanner.
More recently, many people have contributed their photographs to the site, such that my own photos are now in the minority. As the site has increased in popularity I find it a little difficult to keep up with the flood of pictures people send me! However the biggest challenge is not uploading the pictures, but researching and writing the accompanying text.
Originally, when the site was hosted by Geocities, each species had it's own HTML file, and there were individual thumbnail pages and systematic list files, each of which had to be maintained manually. To ease the pain, I built a database in Microsoft Access which would allow me to input the species, html and jpg image details, and it would generate the html code. However it was still hard work to keep updating the site, and frequent errors would creep in.
When I moved to Force9 for hosting, I was able to use Perl scripting to
simplify the maintenance, and this worked well for a couple of years, the Access database
outputting a flat data file which the Perl script could read. The individual species pages,
thumbnail pages and systematic list all derived from the same data file.
When Force9 started to offer PHP and MySQL as part of their hosting package, I moved over to this as a platform, since it gives much more flexibility. Of course it was a whole new language to learn, but has tremendous potential.
The home page script selects a random picture from the database every time you load it, to reduce the boredom level for regular visitors. It also counts the number of species in the database so I don't have to maintain that manually, and increments the home page counter.
The thumbnail pages are now more intelligent, allowing 'drill-down' through family and subfamily, rather than the 70 plus pages of before.
A project I have in mind for the future, which should be possible with the MySQL database, is some kind of identification 'wizard', allowing the user to choose various types of attribute, e.g. colour, size, resting posture, etc., and this would filter the available species with the option of displaying the thumbnails as the returned matches become fewer. Before this, however, I need to reduce my backlog of photographs waiting to be uploaded....
The thumbnails are created using Falk Petro's excellent CD2HTML, (home page http://www.cd2html.de/index.en.html).
The species pages also use popups courtesy of Erik Bostrup's overLIB (home page http://www.bosrup.com/web/overlib/).