• Plans
  • V0910 of website
  • V0907 of website
  • V0807 of website

Plans

V0910 of website

(Sep 2009) I've had a chance to look much more closely at the location data. And it's not a pretty picture. A sampling of a few hundred locations leads me to believe that quite a few of the locations that I got by automated searches using various web sites are pretty bad. So, I think I will approach this differently than I had planned. For the next version, I will add the traditional 450 sites and do some basic clean up on the fossils found field. Then, commencing in January 2010, I will review each and every entry in the data base, combine duplicate entries and get the locations as correct as I am going to get them. I reckon that will take two or more years. Then, and only then will I come back to the fossils found data.

I did accomplish some things though:

• All the PLSS, DLS, UTM locations have been reviewed and, where possible resolved.
• A bunch of formatting errors in locations have been corrected.
• The format of latitude, longitude is now uniform -- degrees and fractions of a degree up to ten thousandths of a degree depending on the initial accuracy.

Here's a summary of the state of location data as of mid-September 2009:

Approximate accuracy of Longitude for various precision of degrees (Latitude will be 25-50% more accurate)

1. The accuracy of Longitude is roughly the value above multiplied times the cosine of Latitude.

2. Some sources give positions to 5, 6 or more fractional digits. I suspect that the positions encountered in day to day map work without surveying are rarely accurate to four digits.
   A code in the form of GA0 through GA5 is provided with my guess as to the actual accuracy of the positions

Other than the position information, I've added an article on the Triassic Basins of the North American Atlantic margin

V0907 of website

(Jun2009) It'll be another two years before readers will see much change to the fossil sites other than (I hope) the addition of 450 new sites every quarter. There a number of major things yet to be done before I start consolidating and reorganizing the data:

• I hope to have the location city, county, state, lat-long under control by the end of 2009
• I hope, perhaps optimistically, to have the fossils found field under control by the end of 2010
• Some other things will get done along the way
  • Validate the contents of the Fossils Found field.
  • Cross check the age and formation fields
  • Straighten out fields 8 and 9 which are sometimes used for references and sometimes as an extension of the comments/directions in Field 4.
  • Continue adding regional geology/paleontology discussions
  • Work out a new set of tools for dealing with the fossil "database" which is outgrowing the current tools.
• Someday, hopefully around 2011, I hope to start combining duplicate sites and start working the site around to its final form -- whatever that turns out to be.

V0807 of website

• Add around 450 new fossil sites to database
• Converting more files from raw HTML to txt2tags markup
• Add Location Field Verification to Web Site preparation
• Partial Spell Checking of the Articles
• Additional latitudes and longitudes in site data

More Distant Future

• General Site Cleanup
• Continue working on HTML Validation documentation
• Continue work on site management software
• Rethink the method for posting the fossil image catalog. Using Blogger.com's manual interface is slow, tedious, and error prone. Also, I'm having trouble with quality of some images. Digital photography of small objects is turning out to be more difficult to master than I had anticipated
• Validate age of formations as well as existence
• Post the Python scripts used to generate/validate parts of the site (so that if I die or lose interest someone else could take over maintaining the list)
• Add some additional short fiction pieces
• Add some articles on speeding up Windows 95 boot
• Update Version in all files not just states
• New Clipboard FAQ
• Figure out how to get Search Engines to index the site (I note that Google has now indexed the site)
• Continue switchover to txt2tags markup (txt2tags files can easily be spell checked)