Source of the checklist
For the prelimimary list of species, I used this posting - http://sgbug.blogspot.com/2010/03/checklist-of-butterflies-of-peninsular... - from the Butterflies of Singapore and Peninsula Malaysia blog. Unfortunately there is no information provided about the author of the blog, or of this particular post, except that it was "iPhone Apps Review". Consequently I'm not sure about the quality of this list. However, it does seem a reasonable place to start, and it is certainly easier to modify an existing checklist than to create one from scratch. Another good starting point would be this book - http://www.amazon.com/Butterflies-Malay-Peninsula-S-Corbet/dp/9839681052... - once I can get hold of a copy of it.
I decided to organize the checklist by family i.e. have 6 menus on the left of my blog. I think this makes it easier to navigate, rather than having all the species in one menu. My colleague, Heather, used a similar approach on her scratchpad - http://eurybia.myspecies.info/.
Importing it to the scratchpad
I originally planned on using the EOL service to import the classification to the scratchpad, but often was faced with a red box containing the following notice:
"The EOL classification service (http://services.eol.org/lifedesk/service.php) does not appear to be running. Please try again later."
I had used this option for the Taygetis site but had begun to have second thoughts as a search based on a family, would import lots of species not revelant to this particular checklist, which would have to be deleted later. So, I decided instead to use the "CSV/Tab delimited file" option instead. This involved making an Excel file of my checklist, following the instructions in the help box. One thing to note, is that even though my taxonomy is labelled with a family (e.g. Nymphalidae - see boxes on the left of the webpage), this term still needs to appear in the file as the ultimate parent of all the other terms.
Be sure to follow the instructions and open the text file, created and saved in Excel, in Word, to enalble you to save the text file as Unicode (UTF-8). Word should automatically ask you to make a selection when you choose to save the file as "Plain Text .txt".
You can tell when a file has not been accepted by the system because it shows an import page that rapidly increases in the number of names being imported: 4678, 58678, 200056...., way more than they were in the selected file.
Another problem I had was that there were characters in the names in my text file that couldn't be accepted e.g. "/" and ".". I had to go through the text file and search and remove these.
Changing the order of the menus
After all 6 families finally had a list of species and appeared on the left panel of the scratchpad, they were in a random order. This was probably the order in which I had successfully imported the file of names for the family. I decided alphabetical order would be most logical.
To find the place where you can change the order of these menus took some searching, but I eventually found it at Home > Administer > Advanced > Site Building > Blocks !
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