Birding

We love to travel to find new birds and participate in a lot of bird counts. We also created a Guide to Birding Field Guides and host a collection of over 300 birding links from all over the globe.

Conservation

While our main focus continues to be birds, we promote other areas of conservation as well. Conserving land not only benefits wildlife, but is hugely beneficial to people as well.

Outdoors

We love all sorts of outdoor activities, especially hiking and spend a lot of time outside with dogs and horses. We are working to produce more articles on all sorts of outdoor fun!

Photography

Every week we bring you Bird Photography Weekly. We periodically talk about our adventures in digiscoping. Feel free to browse our photo lifelist.

37 Reasons You Need the Thesis WordPress Theme

August 3, 2009
Article in: Bird Conservation

WordPress is the number one blogging platform that runs a wide range of world class blogs. But it is also the perfect choice for anyone wanting to get their new idea or product, or to just share to the world what you think. Thesis is a premium (paid for) theme that fully enhances your blogging experience. Here are just some of the reasons you should be running Thesis.

    Customization

    In the realm of blogging, customization means standing out. Thesis looks great immediately after install. But for those with just a tiny bit of CSS knowledge, you’re in for a treat with all the ways of customization.

  1. custom.css file – place all your style changes in this file – organization is nice!
  2. custom-functions.php file – create functions to do all sorts of neat tricks; only requires some basic PHP knowledge
  3. Hooks – Thesis has a slew of hooks that let you add or remove actions (hook them)
  4. Filters – like hooks, filters manage content areas; the main difference is that it works on content that already exists (hence why it is a “filter”
  5. Quick layout changes – within the Admin controls of Thesis (aka, no coding whatsoever) you can pick between 1, 2, or 3 column designs and the widths and positions of these
  6. Sidebar manipulation – create functions to display your sidebar the way you want; better control!
  7. Conditional styling made easy – by using Custom Functions, you can call up different .css files depending on what post/page a user is viewing more on how to do this
  8. Navigation Menu Control – choose which pages show up in your navigation; reorder them; even rename them without altering their URL/linking structure
  9. Image rotator – add images to the “rotator” folder and they will randomly show up when the image rotator is enabled in the multimedia box
  10. Post image control – add/remove borders, change default positioning and more

    11. Thesis Admin Option Controls Including Design Options

    All of these are found in the Thesis Admin and require no coding knowledge; you can play around with the settings to get what you want. The Admin is part of your WordPress interface.

  11. Change Title Tag – choose what shows at the top of the browser window
  12. Add No-Index to various archive pages – SEO-friendly
  13. Add Canonical URLS
  14. Add syndication feed – just cut and paste
  15. Add Header Scripts – to run various javascript functions on your site
  16. Add Footer Scripts – good for analytics tracking code like Google Analytics
  17. Home Page META – the description of your site
  18. Number of featured posts to show on homepage – from 0 to 6; the rest are “teasers”
  19. Font and Font Size changes throughout – easily switch fonts and sizes to your liking
  20. Teasers Setup – change what shows for the smaller (1/2 width) “teaser” posts
  21. Feature Box – show off a specific call to action above your content (or even above your header)
  22. Image Rotator – display randomized photos
  23. Video Embed – instead of photos, embed a video
  24. Custom Multimedia box – add your own code to display what you want (or turn it off completely)
  25. Framework Options – Thesis is default as “page” but you can switch to “full-width” if desired

    26. Display Options found in Thesis Options Control

  26. Header – site name/tagline
  27. Bylines – date, author, etc.
  28. Posts – show full posts or excerpts
  29. Archives – titles, excerpts, etc.
  30. Tagging – allows you to specify where/when to show tags
  31. Comments – show comment numbers, change avatar size, disable comments on pages
  32. Sidebars – disable the default widgets (in case you are only using custom sidebar functions
  33. Administration – housekeeping on where “edit” links show up when admin is signed in

    34. Other Great Features

  34. No need for SEO plugins – straight from Thesis creator, Chris Pearson, there is no need for SEO plugins while running Thesis
  35. Lifetime upgrades – Chris is fully behind his product; his passion for improvement is amazing and in around a year’s time the platform has improved immensely from an already great product.
  36. Support Forum – this may be the overall best feature of Thesis. The users are amazing and willing to share their advice when you inadvertently bung up your blog. (I’ve done it numerous times). No matter what your issue, you’ll find a solution here.
  37. Customization tips – while these are also found in the forums they are worthy of their own acknowledgement. The users of the forum are not just correcting coding mishaps but are always spreading ideas about ways to style and enhance the already amazing Thesis.

Full disclosure: we are affiliates for Thesis. We purchased the developers license for $164.00 (personal license is $87) on the belief that this would be our theme of choice for years to come. It’s been about a year and we know we made the right choice. From Birdfreak.com’s creation to the switch to Thesis we had gone through many design changes trying to find one we were happy with. Each time was a headache of trying to figure out what colors to use, which files to edit, etc. Thesis removes the headaches and lets you focus on your content.

Get Thesis Now and we guarantee you’ll be happy with it. Feel free to contact us if you want more details.

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Firebug: CSS Styling Made Easy for Nature Bloggers

July 6, 2009
Article in: Updates

If you are wondering what CSS is, it is yet another acronym to cloud your brain that essentially means “website styling”. (It actually stands for cascading stylesheets which can complicate the issue.)

We use CSS to position items, make links look pretty, change font sizes, etc. Without CSS we could still have style, it would just be clunkier and not as fun to edit. Wait, did I just say “fun”? Sure! Adding style to your blog/website is a big part of attracting returning visitors, helping visitors read and enjoy your content, and also make a site stand out.

But this isn’t just about CSS. There are many tutorials on how to style like a pro. Instead, we’d like to show how a Firefox plugin called “Firebug” can assist you in editing your blog’s style with ease.
(more…)

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Crazy Egg – Great Tool for Nature Bloggers and Nature Websites

September 11, 2008
Article in: Birding

There are several website analytics tools out there for nature bloggers and nature-related websites but Crazy Egg offers a distinct advantage: heatmaps.

Heatmaps are graphical displays of where your site’s visitors are clicking. The places with more clicks have a larger area of coverage and a “hotter” display. The ability to track this is good for several reasons. For starters, if you plan on advertising on your site, this helps show the potential best ad placements. But, even without advertising, the heatmaps will help show which content is getting the most action.

Heatmap example from our site

There are three other display options available with Crazy Egg: Overlay, List, and Confetti.

Crazy Egg is easy to install and offers a free account that allows you 4 snapshots and limited visitor tracking per month. You set up what you wish to track, plop in a snippet of code and you are set to go. We have been using it for about a year and it is a nice tool in addition to other tracking services.

Look for more tips to improve your blog/website from Birdfreak.com [we are not affiliated with CrazyEgg in any way; we are just a user.]

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