| OrchidWire is a directory of orchid resources available on the Internet. Currently 1455 websites with orchid-related content in 58 countries are listed. OrchidWire is designed, owned, and maintained by Wendell Kozak and is a constantly evolving project... |  |
| The project first went online in 1996 as "Pollinia". Pollinia was primarily a search engine for orchid-related websites, but also included a directory to orchid sites around the world (not very many of them back then, maybe 60 at the most). Both the crawling and serving was done simultaneosly over a 56K modem! All was well for a few years and then a couple of things happened. We lost the domain name (I'm still waiting for that domain renewal notice from Network Solutions!), and Google came along with much more relevant search results than we could provide. A bit discouraging, but the project continued on. |
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| In 1999 I registered the orchidwire.com domain name and the project officially became known as OrchidWire. I decided at that point that OrchidWire would not include the web search feature but instead focus on the directory which was a popular feature on Pollinia. Orchid resources were sorted into several sections instead of just by location. In the following years several features were experimented with, some worked out good, some not so good. |
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| In the fall of 2006 I thought it was time to redesign the site, again. Bit of trivia... the above logo was up on the web only for a couple of weeks. Until one day, while working on the development version of the site, I accidently hit a "swirl" filter in Photoshop. Not being much of a graphic artist, I decided to keep it that way. |
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| Part of the redesign included, as of December 2006, screenshots of the resources listed. This was a feature that had worked pretty good before, but had a couple of issues. One was that for visitors using a dial-up connection the pages were slow to load due to the extra graphics, another was that the screen captures were difficult to keep current. The first problem was solved by offering dial-up users an alternative version of the site that didn't require much bandwidth (try the Lo-Fi Version link on the bottom of most pages). The second problem was solved by figuring out a simpler way (thank you Linux!) to maintain the screenshots. |
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| In 2006 OrchidWire served about 600,000 pages (not counting robot requests) to orchid enthusiasts around the world. This year (2007) the goal is to serve over one million pages. As usual, if you have any problems using the site, or have an idea on how to improve it, please let me know. |
| Thanks for visiting and I hope you come back soon! |
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