PlanetCatfish.com

From http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/view ... 93#p288638:

Jools wrote:This is for me to do:
The concept is that blog and my cats data will then form average data which is presented on the catelog page. The following data is intended to be presented.

User of the site report keeping this fish at (lowest) to (highest) and an average of (average) temperature.

Breeders report spawning this fish at (lowest) to (highest) and an average of (average) temperature.

I am fully aware this depends on the quality of the data users submit...

First I need to implement a process to prune data that has just been left here as people have stopped keeping fish or using the site.

There are one or two things ahead of this in my TODO list which takes about twice as long as in the past with Mats's reduction in programming for the site.

Okay Jools,

After seeing this post, it prompted me to finish up the big enhancement suggestion I've been mulling over for a few months now. I have to admit that the layout and presentation I show below is not polished, and it's not what I think would be "user-friendly" for this website. I prepared it using MS Excel and MS Word, so it's not even laid out in a web-format. However, I hope the intention of this enhancement comes across well.

Also, after reading your post, it sounds to me as though this enhancement idea has been your intention all along.

So here it is: For each species which has more than one BLOG entry, would it be possible for the database to be accessed every so often (perhaps once per month, or once per six months, rather than fresh every time a user clicks on the BLOG for that species) and a "bot" program generate a summary report, in order to present, on one screen, an integrated set of BLOG data which blends and averages all the data obtained from the individual members' BLOGs, so that the user would not need to click on and read every single BLOG entry in order to learn the "big picture" details about breeding a particular species?

As I envision this, the summary report will be similar to the 2-page long sample shown below, which I manually created using all the BLOG entry data for (except that the real report would display on one screen - my example is 2 pages long because my Word document was formatted as pages, and except that the charts and info would be resized and reformatted to fit the web environment).

This BLOG summary report would not be spontaneously visible all the time. Instead, when a user views a CLOG page for a species, they could scroll down to the list of BLOGs for that species, and then in addition to the list of all the BLOGs, there would be a single link to this summary report. The user would still be able to view the individual BLOGs to get details and narrative stories about breeding the species, but if they just want the general stuff like breeding group composition, male / female minimum size, tank size, water quality, preferred food types, clutch size, growth rates, etc., then they would view the summary report.

I imagine this is a big job. I think its difficulty rests in large part in how the data from all the BLOGs is stored in a database.

If you don't understand what I'm proposing, please ask.

Cheers, Eric

P.S., Note that the summary data for things like water quality (temperature, pH, and conductivity) would be somehow related to the innermost growth/breeding polygon described in the other thread which was discussing the difference between survival limits and thriving limits of temperature tolerance (http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/view ... 93#p288637).

Okay, I just realized something very important that I left off of my summary report, and that is date of the spawning (by the way, this would be one of the parameters which would be more valuable if members can register multiple independent spawns for the same species).

With date of spawning analyzed, it would produce a graph displaying any seasonality evidenced by the fish.The data might be complicated by factors such as whether the spawning occurred in the northern or southern hemisphere, but I don't know if that could be parsed out.

Additionally, although it is not currently part of the BLOG data entry page, I would like to suggest adding a new data field to future BLOG reports, which reads something like this:

• Time of day egg laying occurred (IF observed; if not observed, leave blank).

This information would be helpful for people to establish whether the fish prefer to spawn at night, or midday, at morning, etc. If this field seems to specific, maybe it could be generalized from actual time of day to categories such as sunrise, midmorning, midday, sunset, etc., but personally I would think that this type of generalization would cause just as much complication as simply reporting actual time of egg laying.

Cheers, Eric

Some great ideas here, let me look at the multiple spawning report thing first and then I will have a go at the things talked about in this thread.

Cheers,

Jools