How to Support Utopia Nature
Hi birdy and nature-nerdy friends!
We have decided to create a way for folks to
help support Utopia Nature if they wish.
Besides direct local support in the form of
food, water, and cover for wildlife. ;)
We built and maintain the site primarily as an educational and informational resource on the natural history of the Utopia area. A place folks, especially locals, without a wall of field guides could go and perhaps identify a bird, butterfly, or dragonfly they saw. Or learn something about them or other aspects of natural history here. A place to find out what birds or 'bugs' are currently being seen in the area. Or for visitors, maybe get hints on when and where to look for what.
We have kept it fairly family friendly (no gratuitous cursing - only available for patreons - P.S. I do not have a patreon account - LOL). Also we try hard, and it's harder than you think - LOL, to keep it free of politics. Nor is there any advertising (there are no sponsors). We wanted it to be a place to get away from all that. Plenty of that out there already. There are no tracking cookies, and all that comes with that.
A recent look at stats showed 2000-2500 visitors in a couple recent months. I don't look at that annually, but know it has been up at 3000 per month some years ago. It was probably something I said. Or there were more travellers. There does seem to be some minor interest anyway. Over nearly a couple decades it means probably tens of thousands of visitors to the website. Surely lots of them came and visited Utopia. Of course it seems to me that the Chamber of Commerce ought to be sponsoring the site. ;) We have not modernized tech aspects so often it does not show very well in searches. It is a hobby site, not a business or sales site, so we have not persued that.
The bird news page in particular with weekly updates of what we are seeing currently is our main focus of attention and information. It is a repository of data on much of the natural history locally. Now over 18 years of local nature notes can be perused. Migration dates for birds, flight periods for dragonflies or butterflies, when which flowers bloom, and more, can be mined from the data. Of course I would love to database that whole ball o'wax.
All this does cost though. It has taken a lot of time. As in a whole lot of time. Which has been a labor of love obviously. We have never asked for donations. I would love to do lots more with the site, but am very time constrained by having to spend most of that doing other things, to make money. I would guesstimate we have spent near a couple thousand dollars just on the domain name and web hosting space and traffic over the now 18 plus years. It is not free to us to have this space here.
Among the things we would like to do with the site, lots of new pages is at the top of the list. I would like to finish and put up a few nearly completed pages. A couple nearly done are one with discussion and photos of Painted Bunting plumages. Another is called Fishes of Utopia with an annotated species list and photos. Those are both awesome if I must say so myself. Others in the works are on vireos, flycatchers, nest boxes, mushrooms, Cerambycids, flowers, and more. But it takes a lot of time. Lots of that is processing photos to make smaller web-friendly images for posting. I have thousands of images of everything here, but neither the time nor space to put them all up.
Next project, most important, is updating all the butterfly photo family group pages with newer higher res images. I have better higher-res pics of about a hundred of the species here to put up. Many of the original images are old often pixeylated images. Just need the time to crop and resize images for web pages. We have already started putting some of the much better images on those pages. Would like to make some field guide type ID pages for similar species too.
We would also like to buy more web and transfer space. A long time ago we had to quit adding pics due to this limitation. Then we increased it a while back, which is why the last five years there have been lots more new better higher res photos. However we still ration images, reduce resolution (nothing is over 9 out of 10) and image sizes due to allotments. I would like to not have to worry about it and to put all the pages of pics up I want to. The next level up in space and size is a big jump in size (way more than we need) and transfer allotment, and price, which maybe doubles. We can not justify it for a hobby site that does not sell anything or make any money. I would like to put up a color based wildflower guide, have over a hundred plus local species photo'd. Need more bandwidth.
I am also hobbled somewhat by my techinal abilities, which are severely lacking. I would like to figure out how to have playable audio .wav files for bird sound on pages. I have the .wav sound files of most of what makes noise here, except for low frequency stuff. Need the time to finish work on it, and more web and transfer space. A short .wav file is 5mb. If you know an easy way to put up a way folks can click to hear a .wav file, please don't hesitate to offer help. ;). I know xeno-, they are MP3 files only.
Hopefully now you have a better idea of what we are doing, and working on, and would like to be working on. If you would like to help support Utopia Nature, see below for some instructions for using Paypal to do so. Or you can send an email and we will tell you how and where you can send a check.
Of course there is no obligation to do so. We have no plans to go anywhere or change much at the present, besides upgrading butterfly family group photo pages (next) and finishing and adding some more new pages on yet uncovered subjects. We did just get the skeleton up of a new Moths page with photos of some of the local moths. It will be getting lots more photos as time to process them allows.
Thanking you in advance for your kind consideration.
happy nature nerding!
Mitch
Utopia Nature
We built and maintain the site primarily as an educational and informational resource on the natural history of the Utopia area. A place folks, especially locals, without a wall of field guides could go and perhaps identify a bird, butterfly, or dragonfly they saw. Or learn something about them or other aspects of natural history here. A place to find out what birds or 'bugs' are currently being seen in the area. Or for visitors, maybe get hints on when and where to look for what.
We have kept it fairly family friendly (no gratuitous cursing - only available for patreons - P.S. I do not have a patreon account - LOL). Also we try hard, and it's harder than you think - LOL, to keep it free of politics. Nor is there any advertising (there are no sponsors). We wanted it to be a place to get away from all that. Plenty of that out there already. There are no tracking cookies, and all that comes with that.
A recent look at stats showed 2000-2500 visitors in a couple recent months. I don't look at that annually, but know it has been up at 3000 per month some years ago. It was probably something I said. Or there were more travellers. There does seem to be some minor interest anyway. Over nearly a couple decades it means probably tens of thousands of visitors to the website. Surely lots of them came and visited Utopia. Of course it seems to me that the Chamber of Commerce ought to be sponsoring the site. ;) We have not modernized tech aspects so often it does not show very well in searches. It is a hobby site, not a business or sales site, so we have not persued that.
The bird news page in particular with weekly updates of what we are seeing currently is our main focus of attention and information. It is a repository of data on much of the natural history locally. Now over 18 years of local nature notes can be perused. Migration dates for birds, flight periods for dragonflies or butterflies, when which flowers bloom, and more, can be mined from the data. Of course I would love to database that whole ball o'wax.
All this does cost though. It has taken a lot of time. As in a whole lot of time. Which has been a labor of love obviously. We have never asked for donations. I would love to do lots more with the site, but am very time constrained by having to spend most of that doing other things, to make money. I would guesstimate we have spent near a couple thousand dollars just on the domain name and web hosting space and traffic over the now 18 plus years. It is not free to us to have this space here.
Among the things we would like to do with the site, lots of new pages is at the top of the list. I would like to finish and put up a few nearly completed pages. A couple nearly done are one with discussion and photos of Painted Bunting plumages. Another is called Fishes of Utopia with an annotated species list and photos. Those are both awesome if I must say so myself. Others in the works are on vireos, flycatchers, nest boxes, mushrooms, Cerambycids, flowers, and more. But it takes a lot of time. Lots of that is processing photos to make smaller web-friendly images for posting. I have thousands of images of everything here, but neither the time nor space to put them all up.
Next project, most important, is updating all the butterfly photo family group pages with newer higher res images. I have better higher-res pics of about a hundred of the species here to put up. Many of the original images are old often pixeylated images. Just need the time to crop and resize images for web pages. We have already started putting some of the much better images on those pages. Would like to make some field guide type ID pages for similar species too.
We would also like to buy more web and transfer space. A long time ago we had to quit adding pics due to this limitation. Then we increased it a while back, which is why the last five years there have been lots more new better higher res photos. However we still ration images, reduce resolution (nothing is over 9 out of 10) and image sizes due to allotments. I would like to not have to worry about it and to put all the pages of pics up I want to. The next level up in space and size is a big jump in size (way more than we need) and transfer allotment, and price, which maybe doubles. We can not justify it for a hobby site that does not sell anything or make any money. I would like to put up a color based wildflower guide, have over a hundred plus local species photo'd. Need more bandwidth.
I am also hobbled somewhat by my techinal abilities, which are severely lacking. I would like to figure out how to have playable audio .wav files for bird sound on pages. I have the .wav sound files of most of what makes noise here, except for low frequency stuff. Need the time to finish work on it, and more web and transfer space. A short .wav file is 5mb. If you know an easy way to put up a way folks can click to hear a .wav file, please don't hesitate to offer help. ;). I know xeno-, they are MP3 files only.
Hopefully now you have a better idea of what we are doing, and working on, and would like to be working on. If you would like to help support Utopia Nature, see below for some instructions for using Paypal to do so. Or you can send an email and we will tell you how and where you can send a check.
Of course there is no obligation to do so. We have no plans to go anywhere or change much at the present, besides upgrading butterfly family group photo pages (next) and finishing and adding some more new pages on yet uncovered subjects. We did just get the skeleton up of a new Moths page with photos of some of the local moths. It will be getting lots more photos as time to process them allows.
Thanking you in advance for your kind consideration.
happy nature nerding!
Mitch
Utopia Nature
Paypal Instructions -
Our Paypal account is a business account, so anything sent to us needs to be considered as "goods or services" It may be so automatically? Please do not send anything as "friends or family" if you get that option. You may be able to add a note saying it is for Utopia Nature. If it is to the mitch e-dress we will know it is not for fish or corals. LOL ;) Payment will show as being sent to our business name, American Ingenuity. I am not sure it is a good idea to use the word 'donation' whatsoever, as utopianature is not a 501(c)(3) and Paypal seems very particularly picky about that.
You can Paypal us directly to our e-mail address.
mitch AT utopianature DOT com
(Remove the extra spaces and AT as well as DOT, replace those with correct symbols.)
Thanking you for supporting Utopia Nature!
Our Paypal account is a business account, so anything sent to us needs to be considered as "goods or services" It may be so automatically? Please do not send anything as "friends or family" if you get that option. You may be able to add a note saying it is for Utopia Nature. If it is to the mitch e-dress we will know it is not for fish or corals. LOL ;) Payment will show as being sent to our business name, American Ingenuity. I am not sure it is a good idea to use the word 'donation' whatsoever, as utopianature is not a 501(c)(3) and Paypal seems very particularly picky about that.
You can Paypal us directly to our e-mail address.
mitch AT utopianature DOT com
(Remove the extra spaces and AT as well as DOT, replace those with correct symbols.)
Thanking you for supporting Utopia Nature!
Thanks for visiting!
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