Penguin of the Day

Penguin of the Day has been featured on the British Antarctic Survey website since 2008. This simple but fun feature delivers a new penguin each day.

In 2008 with the British Antarctic Survey I was the lead developer on building their public website. Many features were added to support the scientific and data publishing but I pitched one feature that had no use other than sheer enjoyment.

Penguin of the Day was built from the existing photographic catalogue that was managed by the Communications team. I developed a system that would extract data and photos from this internal system and publish them on the website. The website allowed voting and sharing and for a few years also had an iOS and Facebook application that shared the same features.

Today the system is a simple system that uploads images automatically to a WordPress library but the spirit lives on from the early social sharing features of Penguin of the Day.

View the original site on archive.org