Birdpost.com and Birdstack.com Compared
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My last couple of posts have been reviews of Birdpost.com and Birdstack.com websites. As these were supposed to be objective reviews I was constrained from comparing the two sites directly. However as this is not a review I’m going to compare the two sites and what I like, and don’t like about each. So as "first impressions are lasting impressions" lets start with the visual appearance of each site.
Appearance
Well you wouldn’t expect two sites to look the same and these two are radically different in appearance and style. Birdpost.com has a very swish and modern looking landing page with a nice tabbed menu along the top. Right throughout the site the user interface is easy to use and the colour scheme a pleasing pale blue. The whole site looks and feels very professional.
Birdstack.com, on the other hand, has a very basic design. The landing page is very clunky and plain compared with Birdpost.com, it’s still functional; but just doesn’t look very professional. The one advantage is that it probably performs a lot better on a dial-up line or mobile device than Birdpost.com due to it’s minimalist code, and very few images.
Adding Observations
Having signed up for one of these sites you’ll want to add some sightings(well I did). On Birdpost.com there’s a "Add A Bird" button on the right hand side of the page, clicking this opens a nice Web 2.0 style dialog box that allows you to enter a single sighting or multiple observations. Birdstack.com, on the other hand, uses the old Web 1.0 style of form, which works fine, just doesn’t look so cool.
Entering your sightings is a bit different and here the functionaility of the two sites begins to come into play. Both sites do a search as you enter a bird name and suggest names as you type, which is great when you consider there’s about 10,000 bird species to search through. However Birdpost.com hasn’t got this feature right at all, for example start typing Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) and Birdpost.com supplies a list of starlings that doesnt contain Common Starling. With so many possible prefixes (E.g. European, Eurasian, Northern, Common) this is makes it very difficult to find a bird if you’re not sure of the full english name. Birdstack.com, on the other hand, accurately finds species even if you enter only part of the name. If you enter a local variant name for a bird (like Pied Wagail for White Wagtail) it’ll recognize that too and advise you of the correct species name. Birdstack.com have definitely got the feature spot on.
The amount of information you can enter for your observations also differs markedly between the two sites. On both sites you can enter the basic information:
- Bird species
- Date and time
- Tags
- Quantity seen
- Notes
On Birdpost.com you can also enter:
- Whether the bird was in flight
- How close it was (a choice of some pretty arbitrary distances)
Whereas on Birdstack.com you can also enter:
- The location (see more on lists below)
- The trip you were on
- A detailed breakdown of the number seen by age and gender
- A link to any other information online about the sighting (e.g. a blog post)
- Whether the sighting is private (default is public)
Overall you can enter more, relevant information on Birdstack.com than you can on Birdpost.com.
Listing Your Sightings.
I haven’t met a birder yet who didn’t keep lists of observations; life list, year list, garden list, local patch list, work list, county list, country list, trip lists…. There’s no end to how you can list your sightings. Birdpost.com is completely lacking in it’s listing ability. Everything has to be entered by tags, so if, for example, you want a sighting to be included in all your lists you’ve got to remember to enter all the relevant tags and it’s very easy to forget or mis-spell something.
Birdstack.com, on the other hand, has a great system of setting up locations, creating tags and then creating lists from combinations of these. There’s a good example in my review of Birdstack.com so I’m not going to repeat it here. Just sufficient to say that Birdstack.com if far superior in this area than Birdpost.com which really sucks when it comes to creating lists.
Mapping Sightings.
Both sites have the ability to place your sightings on a Google map, however both sites take a very different approach to this with advantages and disadvantages on both sides.
On Birdpost.com every sighting you log is flagged as "unmapped" until you map it. You can do this by opening the map view tab and then displaying all your unmapped sightings. Mapping is a process of dragging a sighting onto the map and clicking the save button. Because you can zoom the map in as close as you want you can place each sighting as accurately as you want.
This approach is great if you have a relatively low volume of observations. However if you record everything you see at a site you visit regularly, your garden for example, one of two things is going to happen:
- Your map is going to be swamped with observations at that site, so much so that it’ll become unusable. Of course you could choose only to map the first sighting of a species at a site in which case:
- Your list of unmapped sightings becomes so long that it becomes unmanageable. It would rapidly get so long that you would find it difficult to locate a sighting that you did want to map.
I think this represents a considerable flaw in the design of Birdpost.com.
Mapping on Birdstack.com isn’t done on a per sighting basis; it’s done for each birding location. As part of adding an observation you need to select which location you were observing at and when you create the locations you can specify their position on a Google map. What this means in practice is that you can’t map each sighting individually; an observation appears on the map at the lat. and long. set for that site. Whilst this helps to keep the confusion down on the map; it’s not as helpful in locating exactly where a species was seen.
Once you’ve got your observations mapped there’s a different viewing experience on both sites. On Birdpost.com you can see a map that locates each specific observation. I thought there was a facility to show all your sightings on a map; but I’ve been unable to locate that today, possibly it was just my imagination.
On Birdstack.com you can click through on a specific observation and it will show you a map with the site marked on it rather than specifically where you saw the bird. By clicking through on the species name you can view a map that shows either all members observations of that species or just your observations of that species.
So which site has the better mapping facilities? Birdpost.com starts out really good; being able to map each sighting to the nearest few metres is great; until you’ve hundreds of sightings for a site. Birdstack.com only maps the location not the sighting so the map is less crowded; but less accurate. I’d just come down in favour of Birdstack.com in this area; after using Birdpost.com for only a few weeks I was finding it unmanageable.
Other Features
Images
Birdpost.com has ‘em and Birdstack.com don’t. WHen you’ve added a sighting on Birdpost.com a nice thumbnail of your species appears associated with the sighting. You can change the thumbnail and you can upload your own photos. If you view the map and roll the mouse of a sighting pin then a little thumbnail of he species as well as the other sighing information appears in the information bubble. It really is a great feature of the site and makes it very attractive. You can even view your life list as thumbnails of the species rather than a plain text list. On Birdstack.com there are no bird photos and no facilites to upload them. Tbhis helps to keep the bandwidth down; but it makes the site very text based and boring in appearance.
Community Features
Both sites have a ‘friends’ feature, though not having any frieds (sob) I’ve not tried these features out. Both sites have a community forum.
Export Sightings
Birdpost.com doesn’t seem to have any export features, which means you can’t backup your sightings in any way. It would be a great shame to use the site for a few years only for them to loose your data. That would suck! Birdstack.com, on the other hand, can export your lists in a number of different formats such as XML and CSV. You can also import CSV data so if you’ve sightings in a spreadsheet you can import these. You can also create an RSS feed of and of your lists or create a Bird Stack . This is a create feature that allows you to create a small widget you can display on other web sites that shows a the latest sightings from that list. You can use any of your lists to create a stack. Here’s an example stack created from my garden list:
Performance
For it’s great looks Birdpost.com suffers from some dreadful performance issues. The sie uses a shed load of Javascript and this, combned with all those lovely pictures, really drags the performance down to a point where the site is very, very slow. It will also throw Javascript errors from time to time, which isn’t very pretty.
Birdstack.com uses only a modicum of Javascript, has no images and performs as a web site should. I’ve also not seen any Javascript errors either.
Summary
Which site will I be using for my sightings? Birdpost.com has a great look and feel and pictures of the birds; but dreadful performance, inability to create decent lists and problems with the map feature really do it down. Birdstack.com looks dowdy and has no images; but works well and has great listing features as well as good exports.
For me the list feature is crucial so, despite the lack of images, Birdstack.com wins the day and I’m now using it for all my observations.
