Student Number: 32619735
This website shares information about common birds and recent sightings in the local area.
This project is a cloud-hosted web application titled “Local Bird Sightings”, deployed on a Microsoft Azure virtual machine using an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model. The purpose of the system is to provide a simple, accessible platform for recording and sharing local bird observations, including species identification, location, date, and descriptive notes. The system is designed as a lightweight static website hosted on an Apache web server running on an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine. The motivation for this project is to demonstrate practical understanding of cloud infrastructure, server deployment, and basic web development concepts. The application simulates a real-world use case where environmental or community data can be recorded and shared publicly in a structured format. It also provides a foundation for future expansion, such as automated data entry through scripts or integration with external APIs. The server is deployed on Microsoft Azure, where a virtual machine is provisioned, configured, and accessed remotely via SSH. Apache2 is installed to serve HTML content stored in the /var/www/html directory. The website is publicly accessible through the virtual machine’s IP address, demonstrating successful network configuration, firewall setup, and HTTP service deployment. This project also incorporates basic system administration skills using Linux command-line tools, including file editing, package installation, and service management. The website's structure uses HTML and CSS to present bird sightings in a readable, organised format. Overall, this project demonstrates the deployment of a functional cloud-based server environment that combines infrastructure management, web hosting, and simple data presentation in a practical and educational use case.
Location: Campus Oval
Date: 10 April 2026
Notes: Singing loudly near trees in the morning.
| Location | Total Sightings |
|---|---|
| Campus Oval | 3 |
| Library Gardens | 2 |
| Wetlands Reserve | 1 |
Weather conditions can influence bird activity, visibility, and movement patterns. Current local weather information can be viewed through the Bureau of Meteorology.
View Bureau of Meteorology Weather Information
This section provides space for bird photographs collected as part of the Local Bird Sightings project.
This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This means that others are free to share, copy, distribute, and adapt the content of this website for any purpose, including commercial use, provided appropriate credit is given to the original author. This licence has been chosen because it is commonly used for educational and web-based content and supports open access and the reuse of learning materials. It allows the project to remain flexible while ensuring proper attribution to the original work's creator.
Recent sightings are manually updated by editing the server hosted file via SSH.