PlanetCatfish.com

I sat down this morning to do some concerted work on the site. First off I finished off the AR datasheet for which I'd had to abandon a couple of days back due to a magpie attempting to remove a significant part of my cookers extractor vent. Yes, really.

Today I noted that Ian Fuller had sent me notification of some new CW-numbers from his recent exciting trip to the Madre de Dios area in Southern Peru. That seemed like a nice addition to the site. However, I've been sitting on a lot of corrections to the Corys and related genera that Ian sent me some time back. It would seem discourteous not to do that first (it was a lot of effort for Ian to review the site).

So, I dig out the emails from Ian and am just about to start when I remember that Birger had reported an issue in the admin functions used when moving images from one species to another. This is something I'd need to do when moving corys around and making corrections. So, it would be a good idea to fix that bug first otherwise people (and the facebook and twitter share functions) will be confused with temporarily incorrect images being shown on species update notifications.

However, I am then troubled by the fact that I will spend 2-3 hours fixing that bug and no one (except those who also give up their quality time to help with the site) will see. In short, it looks like I've not really done anything.

While I ponder if I should quickly add the CW numbers and then look at the bug I notice I have a forum moderator alert. I then need to take 10 minutes to understand why someone has lied about flushing their live Corydoras down the toilet to elicit a quicker response from the forum faithful. I consider the forum rules to make sure I'm not being heavy handed, one warning issued. I reflect that it's the first warning of 2014 which is good news.

Now I feel the need to write all this down. I will go and fix the bug now as it is something that needs done despite being "invisible" to most, but it keeps the gremlins at bay!

Cheers,

Jools

why someone has lied about flushing their live Corydoras down the toilet to elicit a quicker response from the forum faithful.

Most importantly.....make time for a beer

Richard B wrote:Most importantly.....make time for a beer

I will do! However, several hours on, I'm still wrestling with the image caching problem and not getting anywhere fast. Should've just plonked some new images on the site...

Jools

Your doing a great job Jools

And to add to the pressure... A new baby arriving soon

Thanks Jac. It's not really pressure, I do this for fun. I find the technical side of the "job" and also adding data to share good info across the world very rewarding. However, I started this thread as an insight. Threads of this nature can often descend into techno babble about what goes on "under the bonnett" at Planet; I am trying to avoid that.

As I write, I note a new thread with a link to another site with some pictures of spawning, that's good news!

Jools

The issue with cached images is now fixed. I did a lot of thinking / research into various ways to fix the problem. I then messaged MatsP and got his view, which was where I was headed too. He made a small change that fixes the issue. However, it is now 15:55 local time, so need to go do some real life stuff (wrapping [mostly pink] presents for my soon to be four year old).

Jools

I am new to the site and new to catfish in general. I really appreciate this site and extend my thanks!!! I am on the site everyday and have learned a ton. So thanks again!!

Thanks GroovyJeff. But, again, it's really to provide an understanding of what goes on rather than to look for (kind and welcome) praise.

It's also kind of cathartic, so i think I may continue it!

Cheers,

Jools

I will do that @Barbie - although I have to approach from the side at present - twelve days until D3 arrives!

Anyway, work pressure has been high since last post. I added some pictures from Jeremy Basch's awesome first documented spawning of this species which I stand by calling the catfish breeding event of the year. This nicely crowns some real progress has been made with spawning this year.

@MatsP and I have been fiddling with server settings to make uploading large image files possible and I've migrated Planet, AR, zebrapleco.com, dignall.com and Clare's business site (clearriverpartnership.co.uk) on to a much beefier server for the usual increase of traffic over the Northern hemispheres winter.

Over at AR, @Divemaster has had his username synchronized over Planet and AR and as such is hoping to add images and data primarily for some North American species (which reminds me I need to replace with Metriaclima at some point).

Then there is the obscure stuff that nobody cares about. Today, Mats and I are worrying about why the following usernames are not working right.
Something to do with extended characters (e.g. ä, é etc in usernames), once that's in play I then need to harmonise the Terms and Conditions links and content between Planet and AR.

I know this stuff is dull, but, hey, it's what happens.

Jools

I like this tread, it gives an insight in running such a large international forum!

Jools wrote:I will do that @Barbie - although I have to approach from the side at present - twelve days until D3 arrives!
Jools

jac wrote:I like this tread, it gives an insight in running such a large international forum!

[/quote]

And very rewarding for the rest of us! I once was an admin on a large Rottweiler forum so I have an idea of how much work is involved.

Ya. Running the forum is part of it, but the whole site is a custom built thing around the popular forum software PHPBB - the custom bit is quite large now. Before 2003, there was no forum, just the custom bit (smaller then) that ran the articles sections and the catelog etc. but had no interaction with Planet users.

Today I've been vetting and making only minor corrective tweaks to a lot of native american fishes added over the last 48 hours by @Divemaster [cheers!].

I am reminded again by my conscience that I need to spend some quality time on @Coryman corydoras corrections, they have been in my inbox since December 2013. My inbox(es) handling is a curious thing, it is based on how much time I think I have at one sitting to work on the site and how I think the days ahead will go. If I have lots of time and not much on then I go to the bottom of my list and pick off something big (such as Ian's corrections). If I have X minutes to work on the laptop before a hard deadline (like going to a meeting or taking a child to swimming) then I pick off something that looks like X-10 minutes work. Sometimes, when I have 2-3 hours then I pick something I know will take some programming (it is usually relaxing).

For now, I am going to investigate some PHP error weirdness.

Jools

Today I am having fun. In preparation for a new CotM article, I am reviewing the Pimelodid genus . It turns out most of the pictures in the catelog are incorrect and I am moving them around and adding information to correctly identify them.

I will also continue on the review of all from Ian Fuller that has been sitting in my inbox since February this year. I am tempted to start grouping them by the emerging new classification (e.g. Corydoras(Gastrodermus)) if for no other reason than to see what we have that is not yet grouped - however I think this is just a little premature. I am reminded by a very low level niggle about my Corydoras identikit project. This is something I imagined at university when we designed simple expert systems. I got a 32 species model up and running back then (mid 90's), it would take months to create, and need a good artist, but maybe 2015 is the right time to get it fired back up again. It

Last week, we added 964 creative commons images of South East Asian fishes to ARN. Mostly these were not catfishes as many of those species we already had some great pictures of from @Silurus who has also been adding colour versions of many of his black and white images.

The big news is that a major new version of the forum software is available and we plan to implement that this side of Christmas. It's a big change and, if it's really big, might not be possible in that timeframe. Let's see...

Jools

Jools wrote:In preparation for a new CotM article, I am reviewing the Pimelodid genus

Hypophthalmus

. It turns out most of the pictures in the catelog are incorrect and I am moving them around and adding information to correctly identify them.

Although a lumper, I still don't understand why the family Hypopthalmidae was reclassified and included in Pimelodidae.
I have not seen many pictures of Hypopthalmidae and take it that scientists have found out that these fish have no internal fertilization (thus unable to fit into Auchenipteridae). But what has made them decide to place these fish into Pimelodidae?

Although a lumper, I still don't understand why the family Hypopthalmidae was reclassified and included in Pimelodidae.
I have not seen many pictures of Hypopthalmidae and take it that scientists have found out that these fish have no internal fertilization (thus unable to fit into Auchenipteridae). But what has made them decide to place these fish into Pimelodidae?

I am not in ichtyologist, but probably based on genetics. As a birder I see more and more reclassifications of higher order clades (of birds, a group that gets more attention by scientists) based on genetics. Often these families do not make any sense to the eye or to ecology. Hobbyists will just have to deal with that, I fear

Marc van Arc wrote:But what has made them decide to place these fish into Pimelodidae?

AFAIK, they're just specialised midwater pims that were hitherto placed in their own family only because of the methods of classification of the time (90's?) which identified this midwater / specialised feeding divergence as the basis for higher taxonomic ranking. More modern (phylogenetic) thinking says they're just evolved toothless pims. I am sure someone can explain that better.

Jools

So, today, I am re-working the styling at zebrapleco.com. This has been successfully updated to phpBB3.1 which might not seem very significant, but's it's a root and branch upgrade of how the forum software works both behind the scenes and in terms of what the average user sees. Loads of new features as well as a more modern look and feel however it's not a steep learning curve as the changes are intuitive and well thought out.

At present, the new software is implemented at ZP, I've amended the "list of recent forum posts" code to work with the new forum and I am now going through the (painful) process of integrating the new stylesheets to make it all hang together with the fresh new clothes. This will take a day or two.

Why do I mention this here? Well, once I've got ZP finsihed off, I will then start testing phpBB3.1 with AquaticRepublic.com (which, like Planet) uses more of the phpBB framework to validate users and provide functionality around user authentication which is what drives My Cats (or, My Fish on AR), My Aquaria and My BLogs.

Then it's coming here...

Jools

Jools wrote:Then it's coming here...

Having upgrade zebrapleco.com completely and gotten aquaticrepublic.com to a reasonably stable state (and why I've not answered many emails since last week), it is time now to upgrade Planet. I will post an annoucement on it. It looks pretty good actually, I am happy with where the developers are going and it after (about 45 hours) rework it will integrate with Planet/AR nicely.

Jools

Barbie wrote:Ohhh, Shiny! Thank you Jools .

Barbie

Not nearly done yet, but working on it!

Jools

Time passes...

The forum is upgraded to phpbb3.2, the look and feel is a little bit more up-to-date.

@Bullfishkeeping reports that the Cat-eLog search isn't working for searches in inches. I recently pulled several mm to inch calculations into one place and reckon that this has caused the issue, so, as I have 30 mins this morning, I go look.

I find that there is a layout issue with an extra bar above the "The database can be accessed" text and also I don't like the "Species search" text as it isn't styled correctly and is too large. I fix the layout, but run out of time to check the search...

Well, that wasn't too hard. In the end, it was because I was using the wrong conversion function. So, searching the cat-elog using inches as one of the parameters now works.

Trying to ID this doradid, I stumble across the fact the two species of are not in the cat-elog, fortunately, I have a paper with pictures in it I have permission to use, so edit them out and add them into the site.

Reviewing what else is going on around the site, I note @Silurus has added a load of new images of "proper" catfishes from Asia - mostly from the catfish family . Great stuff!

Jools

Re-reading this thread reminds me what a great job you do Jools, and what a fantastic resource PC is, that we often take for granted!

I know a few people who need to read this, when they wonder why their favourite fishies haven't been moved or renamed etc!

Thanks Mark, yes, when fishes get renamed it pleases some and irritates others. Keeping up-to-date is a challenge and we've been burned a few times in the past by adopting new names too quickly. There are quite a few loricariids that are in the queue...

This morning, I've added some nice pictures of a good Scottish name ( ) and a welcome contribution by @Kamas88.

I then got bogged down in some database admin / optimisation stuff which burned nearly two hours, it will have no visible impact beyond things won't slow down (because of it).

Cheers,

Jools

This morning I posted a long overdue video of sent in by long-time Planet contributor @shovelnose. He has also written a CotM, which is now online. I took the (perhaps odd) decision to post this for April 2017. This is odd as I have not posted a CotM since August 2015! I need to get writing...

The thought of writing 19 odd CotM articles does fill me with dread! If I do two a month, it will take me about 10 months to catch-up. However, I can at least do that by publishing them in the past.

Also looked at two re-validated that @LFinley58 brought to my attention / posted in Science News.

Jools

Hi Jools, you're awesome you know that Doing a great job! And I do very much admire your determination to get things done, even when there is little or no feedback for your work.
If only I could split myself into at least two other me's than I could do more to help out.. I promise you now, I will write an article for the COTM too. So that will leave only 9,5 months to catch up then It's the little things that count right

Keep up the good stuff!!!

That's kind Jac, thank you and it means a lot coming from you (official international speaker !). I see the stats, I can see how many unknown humans use the site every day, every hour. That is is free and good quality information that is served up (for nearly 20 years now) means a lot to me. I have sat down to write about Panaqolus tankei this morning, first time I've woken up to write at the weekend in a very long time. It feels good and the coffee is strong!

Cheers,

Jools

Good morning all. This morning, following some time off for Easter, I decided first to tackle a bug @Dave Rinaldo reported. Got it fixed - quite an obscure one which is noted in that post. I spent a few moments still pondering the fact I am not any good at telling several Pims apart when they are young (, and ) but remain, therefore undefinsibly, unsure of some pics of . Realising I'm about to burn two hours reading up on them, I press on with something else...

I add pictures of the two species of Brazilian recently re-validated. It took a while to touch up the photos as published - they're a bit 1947 - but as I have always said, one mediocre picture is better than nothing. This means I am nearly caught up on email to three weeks ago!

Next in my email inbox is something from long time Planet friend Johnny Jensen (@jjphoto) has been visiting Ingo Seidel in Germany, lots of pics to work on. I quickly add one which was lying around from a prior visit to Pier Aquatics and then get sidetracked by some other images. Most were taken by Dave Snell at the fish US catcon over 10 years ago! Time to add them, however they are mostly cichlids and killifishes; so they will appear on AR.

Checking them out, I notice the layout of AR is off. Doh! 30 minutes fixing the CSS and it's all back to how it should be and the pics look good.

Meanwhile @Jac has sent over a CotM article. Great! I was thinking over the weekend that I might write a series of articles about fishes that I encountered in the Rio Xingu trip of a year and a half ago. That might bring in 3 or 4 new entries and aid with the catch-up. @Shovelnose too has promised more (brown fish are cool).