Birdzoom

Sometimes you can't wait for a client to come up with a good idea and you just have to do it yourself.

Birdzoom was one such time and one such idea. While we love the web and work the web a lot, we also pursue our hobbies as often as we can and this was the case this past winter when we took up a new one: birding.

Sure we had noticed birds while we hiked, kayaked or biked in Minneapolis or while we camped in one of Minnesota's lovely State Parks, but something clicked this past winter and we really wanted to learn more about ALL the birds we could find while enjoying the great outdoors.

After a month of birdwatching in the depths of a Minnesota winter (yes, it's not only possible, it's a destination for birders worldwide), Molly got to thinking we should really be saving a list of the birds we'd seen and wouldn't it be cool if it could be done using that new Google Maps implementation in Drupal's geo-location module? Stephen thought it sounded like a really cool idea and away Molly went for a weekend or so and voila! We had a nice little tool we started using to keep track of our birding adventures.

After showing it to some birding friends, the consistent feedback we got was, "Hey, you should make it so anyone can use it. Heck, you could charge money for such a thing". And that's when the real work began in making it so. Molly designed this site and developed all the Drupal for it. We're still working out a few kinks and developing the content.

To all our clients we have worked with to get their content ready for production, let us just say that we now have a deep understanding of just how difficult that task is and if our impatience came through in our tone or actual phrasing of our words during the project, we apologize.