Bubbles in the Bathtub

Several people have asked me over the years how I do it. How do I take care of seaturtle.org? It has become a really big resource, currently composed of more than 3000 pages and, as of this writing, getting more than 9000 hits per day. And it's pretty much all me. Well, that's not exactly true. I have two wonderful partners/volunteers that take care of the links and the news sections for seaturtle.org. Without them those sections would be much less robust and certainly not up-to-date. Obviously the authors that contribute to the Turtle Journals are a great help, as are all the folks that contribute images to the Image Library. Still, the remaining tasks can get a bit overwhelming at times. Just keeping up with the MTN can be a full time job, and I'm usually behind on it. On top of which I have a real job. I handle that website as well simply because no one else in the office can do it. Oh yeah, and then there are all of the other sites that I work on because I can't say no, some pay me a small fee, most are charity cases (MTSG, MTRG, HerpDigest, CRF, Baja Tortugas the sea turtle symposium, others I am probably forgetting and a few others in the works). Any money I collect gets rolled back into seaturtle.org to make it even bigger and better. There's also a sort of hobby site that I spend a good deal of time on, where I work out the bugs in my programs and try new things. Anyone that can find it gets a prize.

In any case, it's all smoke and mirrors. Monkey buttons.

Most of what you see on seaturtle.org is automated or requires as little oversight on my part as I can manage. For example, you may have noticed a recent increase in the amount and timeliness of sea turtle news items appearing on seaturtle.org. Google recently started a news service where their robots scour known news sources and archive the results. So I wrote a program that checks the google news archive automatically every hour for new news items related to sea turtles. Any hits get cued up for Kelly Samek to add to the news section or delete as appropriate. Examples like this abound across the site. The MTN eats up so much of my time because converting articles to web pages is one of the things I have not be able to completely automate.

There are loads of new tools and resources that I want to add to seaturtle.org and I think of new ones almost every day. Some are waiting for me to figure out how to make them work via a monkey button. Some are simply waiting for my time. Some are waiting for money. Some are waiting for bodies. Some I consider important enough that I add them before I figure out how to make the monkey button work. They either quickly obtain a monkey button or fall off of my radar because I can't keep up with them.

Without monkey buttons none of this would be possible.

I love 'em!