Caret have been helping launch another Darwin website, this time Darwin Correspondence. And this time we thought we had the launch under control. The media were expected to publish tomorrow morning, and the site would be up and ready, but we were wrong. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6657237.stm The BBC decided they would publish a story a little earlier than expected.

Its a good way to focus the mind, fixing bugs, deploying patches and changing DNS and hostnames with about 200 users on a site while your doing it. If your lucky the site will still be up in the morning. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/

Technology wise, is a hybrid. A Lucene search engine that indexes using maven 2 plug ins about 100MB of reasonable compact XML into a few 1000 pages of Darwin’s Letter. The search being available on multiple indexes delivering static HTML. Then the whole thing wrapped in a Joomla CMS for the editorial content. It currently takes an Apple Xserve using Continuum about 25 minutes to rebuild and deploy the index but its almost automatic. It also does some Zoomify operations on images to make them available at high res over the web.

And some more news:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/16/ndarwin116.xml

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/05/charles_darwin_.html

http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=62489