IA artefacts. Photo by James Aylett.
IA artefacts. Photo by James Aylett.

/dev/fort 1

In our first sortie, we built Wildlife Near You

Planned earlier that summer, in late November 2008 a dozen of us piled into a bus with wings for the flight to Alderney. Fort Clonque is a 19th century fort now owned and maintained by The Landmark Trust, and served as the perfect base of operations for our week.

Fort Clonque. Photo by Niqui Merret.
Fort Clonque. Photo by Niqui Merret.

Have you ever wanted to know where your nearest Llama is?

During our time there we built Wildlife Near You, coming up with and refining the idea, designing all aspects of the site, and coding the whole thing. As we could perhaps have predicted, it then took a further three months to finish off the remaining few tasks (such as putting an alpha sign-up page in front of it, integrating with Flickr and so forth) that were impractical or forgotten while in Alderney.

The site went into invitation alpha at the start of March 2009, and finally launched in January 2010. It went offline in 2012.

Wildlife Near You's error page. Illustration by Cindy Li.
Wildlife Near You's error page. Illustration by Cindy Li.