Show HN: PaleoCodex, a prehistoric species catalog (using wikipedia data)

paleocodex.com

7 points·mohaps··5 comments

I built PaleoCodex as an online interactive encyclopedia for Dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals for my six year old using wikipedia data.

He is a big dinosaur buff and wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up. His project brief was "Build a pokedex... but for dinosaurs"

Still kind of a WIP (Search is very basic and Text to speech / Listen feature may not work on iPhones, works on iPad/Nexus and Desktop using Chrome and Safari) and very much a weekend hack.

Built using python, tornado, wikipedia data and the skeleton html5 boilerplate. Uses ResponsiveSpeech for text to speech.

Enjoy! (and do send in your comments and suggestions)

Pretty fast page load time. That is really nice when clicking through the entries. A timeline or browsing by time categories would be interesting.

Thanks! Working on the timeline feature. The temporal data and diet/size tags need some clean up - a tedious work via an offline tool with RegEx and some nltk elbow grease :)

When clicking through I wondered how much pages that would be printed in book form (I like printed text). I think one can make it look really great. Especially as the data is heavily structured already.

This is awesome. Great job!

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