What the hell have I been doing?
January 31st, 2010I last posted on December 6th, 2009, and here it is, about 7 weeks later, and nary a blog post. You could hardly say that I’ve been suffering from Ennui, but I’m a bit sick of the internet, even though I gravitate to it multiple times a day and spend some hours in here. Not in my blog, but on my web site.
“What web site?”, I hear you ask, and in reply I say here. Notice the pretty image icons at left, as links to my varied webbish endeavours. And note especially the second link, with the bright yellow toadstools, leading to my famous fungi pages. These are the results of my project, from early in 2009, to make sense of the hundreds of pictures of fungi that I’ve photographed in various places from around 2003 onwards. I got involved with a botany group that go out and locate fungi in the forest. We aim to identify them, not eat them - most Australian fungi are not edible, anyway, and they’re too precious to waste in that way. No! We find them, photograph them, perhaps collect representative samples, and document them, in cooperation with the Melbourne Herbarium.
And so later last year I got down and designed display code, wrote it up, and started the onerous task of entering in all of the data I could find on my images. The results can be seen as above, and you can examine my photos in a series of 21 pages of thumbnail images, with multiple pictures of many species of fungi, with my attempt at a concise description of each species, with links to them on the internet.
List of thumbnail pages here - also via the navigation links at the top and bottom of the pages.
List of Latin names of species here. Of course, you need to know what you’re looking for, but the thumbnail pages are suitable for visual inspection of images - there are about 30 images per page.
Finally, over the years I’ve collected hundreds of pertinent links to various web sites to do with fungi, and for the sake of simplicity I’ve catalogued these per world region, and my list of useful fungi links can be seen here, as a separate web page. I’ve had to go into all of those links and weed out any dead links - the ones that no longer work. I’m still collating more of these, as time allows.
But I’m pretty sick of it all at this stage and just want to sit back and see if it’s all of any value to people out there in internet country. I think it will, and I think the web site works well. I’m certainly getting Googled and picked up by other search engines, because I can track that through my web site admin software - that’s one advantage of having my own registered web site.
Anyway, here’s a couple of my better pictures of attractive-looking fungi to finish up with.

The blue one is Mycena interrupta, common name Pixie’s Parasol, and the violet one is Hygrocybe lewellinae, or by the current name Humidicutis lewellinae, common name Mauve Splitting Waxgill.
Most Australian fungi are different from those in Europe and North America, and most don’t have “common names”; also the names get changed as DNA work get’s done on the fungi, so it’s a fluid sort of situation regarding nomenclature.
If you’re interested, you might like to read my concise introductory remarks to the world of fungi. Over to you!













