Moving the site forward

[Rob]

Hi everyone

This is just a quick announcement to state that Jools of http://www.planetcatfish.com will be taking over the site with immediate effect.

I woudl like to apologies for the state that the site has ended up in , this was obviously not my intention.

When I stated the site almost 10 years ago I did not realise the IT knoweldge and time commitment it would require, hence for the past 3 years I have struggled to keep any involvment. The descision at the time was to let it "run-wild" and hopefuly it would continue to be a valuable resource. Looking at it now, that was evidently the wrong descision.

Jools will take over the management and ownership of the site and hopefully it will get back to it's good old self where it had over 150 people online at the same time.

I still believe that the site is a valuable source of information which has gathered invaluable data and experience.

When the site first started there were only a handful of breeders worldwide and due to environmental pressures this was of great concern to the future population of the fish. Thankfully this is now not the case which will open up the scope for the site even more.

I would like to say thank you to all the members who have helped me over the years especially those at the start and those who have kept the site going over the past few years.

Thank you also to the members who have contributed such valuable experience whilst we have been online.

Rob

[Jools]

By now you'll have seen a few changes and I just wanted to blog where I've got to.

The forum is upgraded and de-cluttered (chat and gallery have been binned - the former not being a great implementation and the latter is superseded by being able to attached images to forum posts in the upgraded forum), the issue with the unsafe warning for firefox users has been resolved. The site is now running on a private server alongside planetcatfish.com. It is vastly more secure although I still need to patch a few things to prevent unwanted spam robot activity.

I've introduced proper stylesheets so the look and feel of all the pages is consistent and more easily altered. I am in the process of working through the various static pages and tidying them up one by one. I am working in the order of the new menu (top right) and have completed "home", "species info", "breeding" and "statistics".

I'll continue with them and them come back to the statistics thing. What's in my mind at the moment is to integrate it with the planetcatfish "my cats" register but let's not get ahead of ourselves!

Meantime, Rob is still involved and the moderation team has been slimmed to those guys "hardy enough to withstand the recent lack of water changes".

I'll keep you posted.

Jools

[Jools]

All the articles have been finalised, the site has a cute new wee favourites icon and I think I've finished moving around menus and links in the top right navigation bar.

So, health stuff next.

Jools

[Jools]

OK, that's everything done. All articles updated, all links fixed, everything. Please report any issues you find ASAP on the helpdesk. As an aside, the site has gone from 679MB down to 15.2MB in size (excluding database and backups) and from 14,345 down to 1,252 files. Simples.

So, what's next? Well, as an enhancement, I will revamp the breeding register and related pages to integrate with PlanetCatfish.com's "My Cats" stuff. This will happen automatically if your forum name here and on Planet are EXACTLY the same - but more on that later. It will take some time to develop it over at Planet.

Meantime, enjoy the revitalised site. Amazing what a water change can do!

Cheers,

Jools

[NeoCult]

Just back to Zebs etc after a few years of illness, never good when only 36 glad to see Jools has taken over and lets hope the site gets back to what it once was

Rob take it easy mate, I am sure you will be back with Zebs again one day, I know I couldnt keep away from them I am able to help again as much as I can if still required guys take it easy... Rob