Chrysis.net Restyling 2003

Starting from the few pages of the new born site in the year 2000, the website has grown much richer, both for its functionalities and for its content, thanks to internal and external contributions. At the moment the site consists of over 1,800 documents (pages and iconographic documents) and it has an optimized occupation of over 100 MB on the server located in the U.S.

About 2/3ds of the web site visitors come from the United States and about one third of them from Europe. Visitors from other parts of the world are not as frequent, probably due to the lower diffusion of Internet Access points in several areas of the planet. The server monthly registers about 5,000 accesses, with a peak of over 8,000 visitors (April 2003). These are extremely interesting values, because they show how the site has grown out of its confined dimensions and how it is now a point of reference for a selected community of enthusiasts, thus accomplishing the original goal of the creator of the site. The adoption of bilingualism for almost every page has definitely played a relevant role for its world wide distribution.

Important implementations have recently been added, among which the migration of some HTML static pages into PHP dynamic pages, supported by the usage of a MySQL Database. These new technologies are now also being used for the Bibliographic database, for the Chrysidid photo galleries and for the non-specific photo galleries. The aim of this migration is the reduction of the number of static pages in favour of dynamic pages that retrieve information from the database (news, photos, bibliographic entries) and return real time assembled pages. The programming for the implementation of the Italian Chrysidids database is still under construction.

The cooperation with Paolo Rosa, naturalist and Chrysidid scholar, has become solid and official and from now on he will appear as co-Author of the contents of the website. It is to his credit the compilation of the bibliographic database with over 1,800 entries and the systematic collection of faunal data that will represent the initial basis and the fundamental part of the Database of the Italian Chrysidids. Thanks to the reciprocally critical encounter it has been decided to reorganize some sections of the site, starting from the homepage, to correct some texts and to create new pages ex-novo. For instance, personal pages have been relocated to personal areas accessible from the "About us" page; the Researches section has been reorganized into published papers and in in progress researches in order to allow others to insert their study programs; an Acknowledgments page has been added. More pages will be added on the Genera of Italian Chrysidids and more photographic images will be added both in the specialist gallery and in the generic ones (that now also host a monographs section).

In conclusion, we would like to express again our invitation to contribute to the website by sharing entomological and macro photographic experiences that could be useful to our visitors.

Gian Luca Agnoli