27th January 2011 - "My Blog" spawning reports feature live!

[Jools]

PlanetCatfish.com offers four ways to interact with the global catfish keeping community. The first, and most familiar, will be the forum. Based on the widely used phpBB software, this has been uniquely modified to integrate with our species data and image library (the “Cat-eLog”) and links your PlanetCatfish.com user account to the remaining three areas, namely, “My Cats, “My Aquaria” and the newly introduced “My Blog”. While “My Cats” has been around for a while, “My Aquaria” went live just over a year ago and is now joined by “My Blog”. Blog in the vernacular is short for binary log; initially a proper nerd term that is now mainstream. We are twisting it a little bit here to mean breeding log, to partner the clog (Cat-eLog).

The “My” triumvirate works like this. If you just want to list the fish you keep, your entry level is “My Cats”. You can store basic things like how many, what gender ratio, when you started and stopped keeping and if you have individual fish for sale. ‘Stopped’ may be sold, death or whatever; but it is important data. The overarching concept here is a population. So, someone with three tanks all with the same species in them may well wish to have three entries for that one species. We’d encourage that because fishes kept in different tanks can have different experiences. That brings us on to “My Aquaria”.

“My Aquaria” exists because we all keep our catfishes in tanks (or ponds, or at least water-tight containers of some form!). The concept here is that a tank will have a set of parameters associated with it too. Filtration, lighting, water parameters, feeding regime (yes, most of us put food in a tank and not in a fish) and temperature and so on. Most people keep more than one species per tank, so we allow your “My Cats” records to each be associated with an aquarium via “My Aquaria”. This way the several species you’re keeping in one tank all inherit the aquarium data you’ve entered for that tank (meaning you don’t have to type it in or keep it up to date in several places) and, finally, when it comes to breeding, you’ve got a lot of the background data there.

“My Blog” or my breeding log is the icing on the cake and completes my vision for the interactive side of the site. Well, the high level of it anyway. I have plans for event driven things which are best thought of as an email driven calendar of events for your tanks and their occupants as well as being able to list non catfish species too – but I digress.

In terms of subjective breeding data, I am aware that a big concern about information sourced from the internet is its veracity. This can be dealt with in three ways, restrict publishing rights to experts, peer review it or rely on weight of numbers (one hundred rights fix a few wrongs). The blog utilises all of these in different measure, it will be imperfect, but even the author of the best reference book in the world is never quite happy with it. I hope it will work quite well.

While initial attempts and successes in spawning a species often closely replicate conditions or events that species is exposed to in nature, sometimes they don’t and often they are found to be more specific than actually is necessary. Again, the perpetual collection of this data will hopefully build us pictures of how species are reproducing in captivity.

The beauty of the entire system is you can access it at your level. I’m delighted see the thousands of populations of bronze corys or common bristlenoses out there. We’re also really interested to learn how long people keep fishes for, what tanks and kit they are using and the breeding data is just what the internet is there for! However, it might seem like a lot of work to keep it all up to date. The system is designed to allow you to record as much or as little data as you wish – and – as with all things internet, record it when you want and how you want. Little drips of information as you find them or a few hours once in a while getting all your data current – it is up to you.

If you just want to record some species you’ve kept or are keeping, then you don’t have to do more. If you’re keeping a bunch of fish but just want to share one breeding experience of a particular species then fine, do that too. Indeed, if you’ve a 50 tank fishroom and just want to showcase that, then that’s fine too. Each and every user can decide what level of detail they wish to record and share, all integrated with the world’s largest catfishkeeping forum and comprehensive species database.

Having started work on this site in 1996 and I have watched it grow ever since, my personal view is that in this decade (our 3rd!) this enhancement continues to keep the site fit-for-purpose and enables it to stay at the leading edge of resources for fishkeepers. With technical advances in what browsers can do, web pages will look less and less like, well, web pages and advances in data sharing, mobile access and contextual geo content are also expected in a short few years. I see the blog as getting us out of the last decade and into a new one in good shape and ready to take advantage of these exciting new technologies. Now we’re well into it, I look forward immensely to the decade and hope we can surf though it with equal success.

Go document your fishkeeping! Have fun sharing your catfishes - "My Blog" can currently be accessed via new links in your personal "My Cats" and/or "My Aquaria" pages.

[Jools]

I should also add, any bugs or enhancement suggestions should be posted, as usual, here. Once a mop of any initial release issues are completed, ongoing work will see the ability to upload images and also the wider distribution and linking of Blog data around the site and that will include a Breeders Award Programme style leaderboard.

Jools