Lone Star Internet, Inc. developed the Wild About Texas Wildflowers site out of a love for the Texas outdoors, the responsibility of capable internet design firms to aid in providing content to the online community, and as a chance to show off some of our development talents.

The following is a description of the application that produces the site and allows us to maintain it with relatively little effort:

We developed a database of flower genus (scientific) names, common names, descriptions, growing locations, pictures, and possible misspellings. Using this database we developed a web interface for adding and maintaining the database. All of the flowers pages, including the main links page and all of the flower detail pages are generated by our publishing software using templates and the information from the database.

The sightings are generated from the "Share Your Sightings" form on the Wild About Texas Wildflowers site. The form information is posted to a sightings database and an email is generated to our reviewer that a sighting has been submitted. Using our administrative interface, he reviews the submission for language and layout, researches and inputs responses to some sightings, then posts the approved sightings to the database. Using our publishing software, the sightings are added in date order to the sightings pages and using our flower database, the full text of the sightings is examined for flower names and links to the flower detail pages are added automatically.

Using the LSI publishing software allows us to maintain current, updated information on the web site without using dynamic web pages. Dynamic content web sites perform a database query each time a page is requested (well - not exactly true, some dynamic content web sites load the pages into memory until the information is updated - if you have a lot of pages that are accessed regularly, this requires a lot of memory). Instead, we publish large amounts of data in static standard HTML format, which the web server can very easily serve to our visitors. We use the web server for what it does best, serving web pages. After updating the databases, we simply re-publish the site (takes about 30 seconds to republish the site).

The screen saver was produced using Flash, this allowed us to include a small tasteful and eye-catching bit of advertising at the bottom of the screen and made it possible for the high quality images to run full screen at any resolution.

Lone Star Internet, Inc. has been providing web based solutions for the corporate community since 1996. If we can develop a solution for your company, please contact us at (800) 538-0538 or (512) 708-8006.

If you are interested in learning more about Lone Star Internet, Inc. (and you have the Flash plug in) click here.

If you would like to download the free Flash plug in, click here.

I hope you enjoy the Wild About Texas Wildflowers site as much as we do!

Very Truly Yours,

Ken Biggs
President
Lone Star Internet, Inc.
Where Business Happens

Voice: (512) 708-8006
Email: biggs@lone-star.net
211 East 7th Street, Suite 1110
Austin, TX 78701