PlanetCatfish.com

I know that it was recently said in a post that the show sizes feature isn't done yet, but can some sort of visual que like a bar be added so that a quick comparison of sizes can be done without having to look at a bunch of numbers.

It would certainly be possible. However, unless you select only a few fish, you wouldn't get much useful out of it without tricky stuff like logarithmic scale or something liek that. The reason being that the length difference between the shortest and longest catfish is 25 and 5000 millimeter, so a factor of 200 or so. With a linear scale for all fish, that would mean that the shortest one would be one pixel wide on a 200 pixel long bar [around quarter of the screen width on your average computer screen], and it would not be easy to read.

Maybe using colours would work better.

Here's a quick hack (using Excel) of how it would look with a linear scale:


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Mats

I've talked about this before in here, then I suggested and I think it still holds true, that you'd have to do something like categories each fish into several size bands.

up to 50mm
51 to 120mm
121 to 300mm
301mm to 600mm
601mm or bigger

However, I've now written the show sizes page and it wouldn't take more than 3-4 hours work to twist it around to doing a "view species by size bading type thing" - is that what you're after? Actually, it wouldn't then take much past the to do a "show all species between x and y mm SL".

This kind of size based data presentation has been asked about quite a lot, so I recognise it's a thing folks would like to see.

Jools

What I was mainly thinking was, "I have an X gallon tank, show me what would be appropriate to house in it", so either separating the fish into size bands or allowing the user to select only a certain size range would be an adequate solution.

RogerMcAllen wrote:What I was mainly thinking was, "I have an X gallon tank, show me what would be appropriate to house in it", so either separating the fish into size bands or allowing the user to select only a certain size range would be an adequate solution.

Yes, but as was discussed in the post ( http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/view ... hp?t=14058 ) there's a big difference between tank sizes for active and inactive (cat)fishes, it's a what point we cross from being gospel to advisory.

Jools

OK, the size thing, how about...

a) A page that lists all species by descening size.

b) An entry on the catelog page that links to other fish within a size range of +/- 25% (a similar feature would also be forthcoming for pH and temparature ranges).

Does that float anyones boat?

Jools

Yes, that keeps my boat perfectly bouyant.

RogerMcAllen wrote:Yes, that keeps my boat perfectly bouyant.

Good, WIP: http://www.planetcatfish.com/catelog/sizes.php

Jools

Job done. We now have a sizes page and it is linked from "Show near, nearer or same sized spp." links on EVERY species that has size information on it.

Jools