Toolbar at the bottom added. Site search, scroll-to-top arrow (far right), google translation, and RSS feed of this very list of updates.

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Home page finished. Introductory explanation to the two major facets of the site thus far.

Field Guide 1966

The right field guide is hard to find. Many cover such a broad geographic area that they fail to list some of the more elusive specimens in one's immediate vicinity. Others contain the right species, but the information is so technical that reading about one's latest find becomes a chore.

When working with youth, this problem is compounded. It's difficult to keep a student interested when the book they're using is too complicated or doesn't contain the information they seek.

I won't claim that this field guide solves all of those problems, or even that it will ever be finished, but I can promise you this: Every animal you see here can be found in the vicinity of Portland, Oregon and Mount Hood. The information provided will not require a degree in wildlife biology to understand. And as it is a complement to the ODS curriculum, the information on each animal will be arranged under the subcategories of habitat, adaptation, and niche.

Read More...

Contact page finished.

This is the third incarnation of my Outdoor School Animals Curriculum site.

The first was a GeoCities site. Remember GeoCities? Go there now and you'll get a lovely notification that GeoCities has closed. My very first foray into the realm of HTML back in 1996 was on GeoCities. I proudly created my own (Star Wars themed) web page using the built-in GeoCities editor, and then eagerly told a couple of my computer scientist friends about it. They rolled their eyes and told me they would be boycotting my page until I learned to write raw code. So, I taught myself to write raw code, within the GeoCities framework. Fast forward to many years later (and many other various websites, pages, and hosting plans later) when I wanted to create a curriculum site: I knew I could use the free hosting format of GeoCities to implement all the raw code I needed to, and I knew I could do it quickly, so it became the first home of NAM*AN*IMALS.

Having acquired that dissatisfaction with default options through learning how much more I could do when I manipulate the code myself, I started to become more interested in the power of CSS. Wanting to try it out for myself, I transferred all of the content from the GeoCities site to my own ftp-accessed domain, and significantly re-styled it in the process. This became the second home of NAM*AN*IMALS, one that can still be accessed, though will no longer be updated. Though I enjoyed the process of writing all of the CSS and HTML myself, I much prefer taking an existing template and changing it to suit my needs.

Enter Weebly. This current site has powerful, versatile, and very simple to use drag-and-drop editing (I can see my computer scientist friends rolling their eyes at me), but still allows access to the code for tweaking and personalization. This is not my first Weebly site. I seem to end up using Weebly for almost everything, and I hope it never disappears.

Throughout my time working at Outdoor School, I have wanted to create an "Ultimate Field Guide" that had every animal I wanted in it, with all of the information I was looking for, and nothing else. This would be (is) a ludicrously large undertaking, but it has always been a goal of mine. So, when I was starting fresh with a new site, I considered calling it "The Ultimate Field Guide," but the title was both unwieldy and not very specific. It wouldn't be just anyone's version of "ultimate," it would only be my own. This field guide would work for Animals Field Study at all of the Outdoor School sites, however, because they are all geographically close and ecologically similar. Still a field guide in the traditional sense, but specific to Outdoor School, I needed a name that would mean Outdoor School to those who know Outdoor School, but could be neutral enough to be used by anyone in the area (Northwest Oregon, Southwest Washington). I settled on "Field Guide 1966" as an homage to the founding year of MESD's Outdoor School program.

This site incorporates both the Ultimate Field Guide concept and my Animals Curriculum for Outdoor School. In the future, it may include even more than that.

When I finish this site, in about 100 years, there will be so many pages of useful information that it will be incredibly difficult to find anything new. So, as I add pages or pieces of pages to this site, look for news of it here, on the updates page.