Diese Seite führt alle wichtigen Änderungen technischer Aspekte der Zoographia Germaniae auf und enthält auch dringende Bekanntmachung was Hosting, Verfügbarkeit, Sicherheit und Service anbelangt.

NOTE: as of October 2021 the language of Zoographia Germaniae has switched from English to German: please see the News Entry from September 20, 2021 for an explanation why.

2. April 2024
Übersetzung des "Site-Rückgrats" ins Deutsche
Seit ich die Zoographia Germaniae vor fast 3 Jahren von der englischen auf die deutsche Sprache umgestellt habe, stört es mich, dass die meisten allgemeinen Seiten der Site (also quasi das Site-Rückgrat) weiterhin auf Englisch sind. Über die nächsten Wochen und Monate werde ich nun endlich versuchen, das Gerüst der Zoographia Germaniae ins Deutsche zu übersetzen. In dieser Zeitspanne kann es also zu Unterbrechungen des "Site-Rückgrats", wie z. B. die "Hilfe"- oder die "News"-Seiten kommen, aber die Taxon-Seiten sollten nicht betroffen sein.

18. März 2024
Serverprobleme an Wochenenden (Freitag nachmittags- Montag morgens)
In der letzten Zeit gab es im Rechenzentrum leider wiederholt an den Wochenenden Ausfälle des SSH/RDP-Servers, die dazu führten, dass nicht auf Zoographia Germaniae zugegriffen werden konnte und eine Fehlermeldung angezeigt wurde ("Permission denied"). Die Serverausfälle ereignen sich meist Freitags am Nachmittag und werden dann erst am Montag bearbeitet und behoben. Ich möchte mich für diese Störungen entschuldigen, befürchte aber, dass solche Ausfälle an Wochenenden leider auch in Zukunft vorkommen werden, weil offenbar zu wenig Personal am Wochenende vor Ort ist, um den Fehler zügig zu beheben.

13. Juni 2022
Massiver Serverausfall
Eine derart lange Downtime des Servers auf dem die Dateien zur Zoographia Germaniae liegen hat es bislang noch nicht gegeben: seit Donnerstag letzter Woche war der Server login.gwdg.de ausgefallen! Wer in diesen 5 Tagen versucht hat die Zoographia Germaniae aufzurufen hat nur eine wenig hilfreiche Fehlermeldung gesehen, und ich möchte mich dafür bei allen Benutzerinnen und Benutzern entschuldigen. Inzwischen hat die GWDG (das Rechenzentrum das den Server betreibt) den Server wieder in Betrieb genommen und auch die meisten Seiten der Zoographia Germaniae sind wieder erreichbar. Allerdings kämpft die GWDG weiter mit Server-Problemen, derzeit ist beispielsweise ausgerechnet derjenige Server ausgefallen, mit dem die Zustandsübersicht über zentrale Dienste erstellt wird; die Gefahr eines weiteren Serverausfalls ist also noch nicht gebannt. Ich hoffe aber, dass die nächste Downtime schlimmstenfalls nur Stunden, aber nicht wieder Tage dauern wird.

26. Dezember 2021
Vereinfachte Ansicht - wie schaltet man das ab?
Seitdem ich alle neu hinzugefügten Seiten in einem strikten CSS-Layout erstelle, können diese HTML-Seiten von mobilen Browsern in einer vereinfachten Ansicht angezeigt werden. Die meisten mobilen Browser unterlassen dies jedoch, weil die vereinfachte Ansicht gleichzeitig bedeutet, dass alle Steuerungselemente und Abbildungen nicht angezeigt werden und die angezeigte Seite somit nicht normal genutzt werden kann. Chrome für Android ist da jedoch wesentlich penetranter und blendet bei jeder Seite ein Dialogfenster ein mit der Frage, ob man nicht doch lieber die "vereinfachte Ansicht" sehen möchte. Bis vor kurzem hatte man wenigstens die Möglichkeit, dieses Dialogfenster durch Berühren des "X" zu schließen, aber in den neuesten Versionen von Chrome für Android ist das Dialogfenster nun ein flottierendes Pop-up, das nicht mehr weggeklickt werden kann und das auch noch den oberen Teil der Seite völlig verdeckt (also ausgerechnet den Teil, wo bei vielen Webseiten das Menü und Sucheingabe sind). Man muss jetzt immer ein paar Sekunden warten, bis das Pop-up von alleine verschwindet- nur um auf der nächsten Seite schon wieder zu erscheinen. Mit einem Satz: das nervt kolossal! Leider gibt es keine (mir bekannte) programmierseitige Lösung, mit der man als Webmaster dem Browser signalisieren kann, dass er keine vereinfachte Ansicht anbieten soll. Also muss der Nutzer tätig werden: Chrome für Android-Nutzer, die bei ihrem Besuch der Zoographia Germaniae mit dem Handy oder Tablet nicht dauernd vom "Vereinfachte Ansicht"-Pop-up genervt werden möchten, müssen in den chrome://flags das "Reader mode triggering" auf "Never" setzen. Dann ist der Spuk vorbei.

20. Dezember 2021
Fröhliche Feststage
Ich wünsche allen Besucherinnen und Besuchern meiner "Tierinternetseite" fröhliche und besinnliche Feiertage und kommen Sie gut und gesund ins neue Jahr! Das zu Ende gehende Jahr hat auf der "Zoographia Germaniae" leider wieder nicht viel Neues gebracht, zu sehr haben mich meine anderen Verpflichtungen in Beschlag genommen. Es bleibt, wie auch in den letzten Jahren, die Hoffnung, dass es im neuen Jahr besser wird. In diesem Sinne: alles Gute und einen guten Rutsch!

September 20, 2021
New purpose - new language
Neuer Zweck - neue Sprache
Zoographia Germaniae is shifting its purpose, slightly, and this brings about another tough decision: a change of English to German. My "animal website" has shifted its purpose several times since I started the site in 2005. Initially, it was just an unstructured repository for my photos, in the meantime I intend it as a systematic repository for zoological information. But now I need to change the purpose again, at least slightly: the Corona virus pandemic forced universities around the world to re-think their ways of teaching. In my case, I realised that I need an online tool to teach my students about the diversity of the German fauna. All online tools developed during the pandemic helped to continue teaching, but of course they cannot fully substitute for the experience of identifying a real specimen. However, it is also clear that a combination of digital tools plus working with real specimens enhances the learning experience and improves teaching success. In the future, I want to use my site in parallel with my hands-on-courses at university to teach about the biodiversity of Germany. Most of these courses, however, are at the Bachelor´s or Lehramt (prospective biology teachers) level and these courses are exclusively in German. Therefore, I need my zoological information in German and I will switch from English to German. This is a step not taken light-heartedly, because I know that the language of the Web is English. But there is one thing that makes me feel optimistic about it: translation programs have improved tremendously over the past years and you can already translate Web pages in real time, e.g. with the Google Translate tool or the DeepL tool, and I predict that in a few years from now, languages will be irrelevant on the internet, because artificial intelligence tools will be capable of translating everything into any language without the user even knowing the original language of a page.
I will not (yet) translate any existing species pages into German, nor do I plan to translate the "core" or "service" pages, like the present one. But all new species pages that I add from now on, will be in German. I hope that all non-German speaking users of my site will understand my motivations to change the language, and I hope that my students will use my site intensively to deepen their knowledge about the German fauna! We urgently need more young experts on systematics, taxonomy and biodiversity!

December 23, 2019
Season's Greetings – again
As most of you have probably already noticed, I have not added a single updated or new page in 2019. The past year has been even busier than the year before and there was simply no time to spare for my favourite pastime (i.e. writing for Zoographia Germaniae). I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to all readers for any inconvenience, especially since this lack of updating has left a number of pages quite outdated. The chances of 2020 being any better than 2019 are bleak, but the optimist in me believes that I will find some time in 2020 to add a few things here and there, and to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Zoographia Germaniae.
I wish all readers of Zoographia Germaniae a wonderful and easy holiday season and a good start into a healthy and safe year 2020!

November 29, 2018
Season's Greetings
The past year has been a busy experience for me and this also had a significant impact on Zoographia Germaniae. In the beginning of the year I have moved from Göttingen University to my new post at Gießen University, and this left next to no time to care for Zoographia Germaniae. There has been a major update of the Annelida section, because this taxon has witnessed a fundamental change of taxonomy (just imagine that a well-known taxon like the Polychaeta is now gone forever!–at least in taxonomy), but apart from this not much has happened on this site. I have also closed down the Twitter feed, because I did not find the time to tweet anything. And sadly I did not manage to publish any new issues of my "Hefte zur Tierwelt Deutschlands" series. I very, very much hope that in 2019 there will be more time to spend on my work here on Zoographia Germaniae. In the meantime, I wish all users of Zoographia Germaniae a wonderful and easy holiday season and a good start into a healthy and safe year 2019!

July 18, 2017
Downtime!
There will be excessive refurbishments at the GWDG (the current host of Zoographia Germaniae) and therefore the entire site will be down from July 21 until July 23, 2017. I hope that after that date everything will be running as usual.

September 15, 2016
Zoographia Germaniae is now on Twitter
I will use the Twitter account to post news and notices that also appear here on this page, plus news about important additions to my Site. I will also post about interesting publications and other news dealing with the fauna of Germany that come to my attention. A huge advantage of Twitter is that I will also be able to post service notices when the Site itself is down (which has happened too often recently) and users might wonder what has happened.
If you want to receive tweets from Zoographia Germaniae, then please follow me on Twitter: @ZoographiaG

March 24, 2016
Launch of the new name "Zoographia Germaniae"
The first few pages with the new name and new CSS-based layout are now online. This is the first step in a presumably long process of updating my site, and I take this opportunity to apologize for any inconvenience caused by the renaming and updating of the site. In the months (or probably years) to come, many pages will still display the old name and diverse versions of the older layout at various places. In addition, a few links within the site will be broken or re-directed because of internal restructuring during the update. I am going to make every effort to repair any broken links or other flaws as quickly as possible, and I hope that the users of my site will support my efforts to re-create my site by reporting anything unusual or annoying, so that I can attend to the problem as quickly as possible.

March 11, 2016: Zoographia Germaniae - a new name for DEpository
DEpository gets a new name. Although I have been using the name "DEpository" for my site for a couple of years now, I have now decided to rename my site "Zoographia Germaniae". This was a difficult decision, because a new name always faces the risk of confusing users. But I felt that it was a neccessary step for two reasons:
(1) The name "DEpository" does not reveal what my site is about. It suggests that it is a depository of some kind, but for what? Even if one realizes that the capital letters at the beginning are a hint to the international abbreviation "DE" for "Germany", there is still no indication that it is a repository of zoological information. I believe that "Zoographia Germaniae" conveys much better the two main aspects of my site: Zoological information and the geographic focus on the German fauna.
(2) The name "DEpository" does not generate significant hits in search engines. Apart from the two capital letters at the beginning, "DEpository" is a normal English word. Because internet search engines usually neglect capital letters, they just return pages containing the word "depository" and thus cannot find my site directly. Of course, being difficult to find with search engines drastically reduces the visibility of my site. I believe that "Zoographia Germaniae" is a name that identifies my site uniquely and will therefore make it much easier for users to find the site using a simple search in Google, Bing and the like. Indeed, a search using "Zoographia Germaniae" (including the quotation marks) in Google and Bing in March 2016, before the launch of the new name, produced no hits with both search engines, thus indicating that the name is indeed specific and unique.

The change of the name will not affect all pages in the same manner immediately. I will re-design the main scaffold pages (like the Home page or this News page). However, all other pages of my site are individual HTML documents that will have to be updated manually one by one. All high-rooted elements (e.g. the header logo) will display the new name immediately, but all deep-rooted elements (e.g. page titles, search scripts etc.) will still show the old name, until I have the time to manually update all of them. For sure, this will take some time, and I hope that this period of "double-naming" will not be too annoying for the users of my site.

December 11, 2015: I have now received an answer from the GWDG Service Team telling me that they cannot find anything wrong with the access to my site. Apparently this means that the slow speed of page loading and PHP script execution is now a normal feature of the service. Therefore I will now have to search for new hosting possibilities, which I always postponed during the recent years, because this will also mean a complete change of URLs (i.e. all links and references from others to my site will be broken). In the meantime, I apologize to all users of my site for the annoying service problems and I hope that I will find an acceptable solution in the new year.

December 10, 2015: I apologize to all users for severe problems to access the DEpository site. Currently, the site is temporarily down or, if accessible, access is extremely slow and several elements are not loading (e.g. images, PHP scripts). Apparently, the host (GWDG) has severe difficulties to provide a stable service at the present time. I have contacted their service team, but have no answer yet. Apparently, a number of defective upgrades and power surges listed on their Service Page makes a stable service currently impossible.

December 9, 2015: Access to DEpository was disturbed and extremely slow on December 8 and December 9. I have presently no information about the reason for this malfunction, but there might be a connection to issues announced by the GWDG (the current host of my Web site) on their Web site: there has been a server upgrade and three further power surges (in addition to the one that occurred in September). Apparently, these issues negatively affected the ability of the GWDG to provide their services. Currently, access to DEpository has improved, but there are still delays in loading and displaying images (JPEG and PNG). Hopefully, these problems will be solved very soon as well.

September 23, 2015: Due to a major power surge several services of the GWDG (the company where DEpository is currently hosted) went offline for several hours. This also included DEpository. Unfortunately, there was also some damage to the storage facilities and I am not sure whether all parts of DEpository have survived the crash. So please contact me if you experience problems, like broken links, missing pages or missing images.

January 28, 2015: Happy new year to all readers! The past year saw only little progress here on DEpository and a new issue of the "Hefte zur Tierwelt Deutschlands" is also still pending, but I hope to be more productive in the new year. Frequent users of DEpository may have noticed that the "diversity" of page layouts has again increased. This is because I have decided to once more revise the layout that I had introduced last year. Last year I started to have uniform URLs, but the layout of the pages at different levels of the site hierarchy was still not uniform. Now I have decided to have one uniform page layout for all pages, irrespective of their level. I hope that this decision does not cause too much inconvenience and will be less and less visible as more and more pages will be updated to the new layout in the years to come.

March 11, 2014: At the end of February, the GWDG (the current host of DEpository) has upgraded the PHP and Apache versions. So far, I have no reports of any service disruptions of DEpository and my scripts appear to work well with the upgrades. Please notify me, however, if you notice any problems related to scripting.

January 13, 2014: Happy new year to all users of DEpository! You may have realized that the file structure in the taxa Mammalia and Aves has been changed. These are the first steps of my move towards a unified file structure and in 2014 I plan to change many more groups to this scheme of standardized paths. Unfortunately, this also means that the path to all files changes: if you have bookmarked or linked to any of these pages, then these will be broken now. In addition, the search function does not yet work with all of the new pages, but I am working on it. I apologize for this inconvenience and hope that you will find that the unified file structure has more advantages for the stability and linkability of the site than it has disadvantages in its initial phase. The unified path structure also means that links from external sites can now be generated automatically. Please change your bookmarks and stay tuned for more changes.

July 4, 2013: Important notice for users of Firefox: the latest version of the Firefox browser, version 22.0, has a change in the default zoom level. For Windows users this default zoom level is now automatically adjusted to the zoom setting of your Windows OS. Many users have set this zoom setting to values above 100%, because the text and icons in the 100% setting are very small and difficult to read, especially on high resolution screens (that most newer devices have). In this way, the coupling of Firefox zoom and Windows zoom results in enlarged text and images of all Web pages. While the text enlargement is unproblematic, the enlargement of images leads to significant blurring. If you view DEpository with these settings using the new Firefox version, then all images (including logos) will appear blurred. I do not know whether this problem will be fixed in a future version of Firefox. In the meantime, you can change the zoom level in Firefox by hand for every site (hold down the "Ctrl" key and type the "-" key once or twice until the images look crisp again), or use a different browser.

February 19, 2013: Service problems occurred due to malfunctions of the LDAP-server of the GWDG, the organisation where DEpository is currently hosted. The problems included display errors, with missing images or other elements of a page, or "page not found" error messages. Although the problems with the LDAP-server have been solved, occasional problems persist and please accept my apologies, if you experience service problems while using DEpository. I am currently investigating alternative possibilities for a safe and reliable hosting of DEpository.