A screenshot of Flickr thumbnails ordered by month, flora for May, June & July.

As someone with an interest in natural history, I often look forward to seasonal occurrences, the first cuckoo or blackthorn blossom.

I also keep track of some of these things here on my blog and on Flickr. I find searching both places useful for all sorts of reasons, but not for figuring out what to expect or remembering when I’ve heard the first cuckoo.

A while back I, sort of solved the problem here by making a page that allows me to search the blog and order the results by the date without the years.

I’ve been playing about with Flickr searches in the same way and now have a simple page which searches for a tag and order the page by months, ignoring the years. The page loads the tag flora by default. If you give it a t parameter, it will search for that instead: ?t=butterfly. I’ve also brefly tested a u parameter for username. This needs to be a user’s NSID (71428177@N00 not troutcolor), it defaults to mine.

It also also loads the first 500 images, which is a bridge I’ll need to cross for some tags soon.

Update, 22 Aug 2025, I’ve improved this somewhat and moved it here: Flickr By Month. Defaults to butterflies now.

A name for something I knew about, canopy shyness, but didn’t know.

“When the leaves are almost gone, the branches show their ‘canopy shyness’ – a phenomenon observed in many species of trees in which the crowns of mature trees do not touch each other,” says Niven.

wildlife photo award

I love trees from below. The photographs on the British Wildlife Photography Awards are amazing.

gif of kidpix 'bomb' rummer

This is a blast from the past. This was one of the first applications I saw first apps when I first used computers. My classes at the time really enjoyed using this.

The other apps I remember from those days included Claris Works1 and HyperCard2
Amazing to see a Mac with kid pix running in emulation at archive.org. It feels snappier than the LCs we had back then.

A pity I can’t get it going on iOS as I’d love to see my current class using it. The is a dialogue to input your name and I can’t type in it on iPad. Workarounds welcome.

The featured image is of the ‘bomb’ eraser ,which my pupils would use endlessly.

  1. I really enjoyed teaching with Claris Works, the drawing documents were great for teaching about layers, rotation etc and could be compared to the paint docs. ↩︎
  2. First as a source of clip art, then as everything. ↩︎