FrugalReef Blog

It’s amazing how much reef content there is on youtube!  Seems like everybody must be videotaping their aquariums! I’ve added a new module to the wiki installation that will allow us to embed youtube videos right into the articles.   This is great because sometimes no photo can do justice for a creature, some creatures are just amazing in the ways they move!

Check out Lettuce Nudibranch to see how this embeding is done, and to see frugalreef’s first contribution to the youtube community.  Notice that the movies are all wrapped in a nonprintable markup to prevent them from trying to print out when a user tries to print a char sheet.   This is important, because youtube videos won’t print!

I’ve implemented a far improved captcha anti-spam system.   This new system uses captcha’s from http://recaptcha.net/.  There are a couple great things about this system.   First, the captchas go to a good cause.  Every time you fill one of these captchas out, you’re helping to digitize a book for the internet Archive or old editions of the New York Times.  Second, the captchas are known secure, because the words submitted to the system are those that failed OCR by the high end production systems that are digitizing these books.   Third, the captcha is very user friendly with both the ability to hear the puzzle (for the diabled) and the ability to easily aquire a new puzzle if the one you’re looking at is garbage.

Hello everyone!  Today I moved us over to a new hosting company.  We’ll see a higher quality of service and hopefully no downtime :)  Good luck to us!   If I lost any edits while doing the move I apologize!  If you see any problems please email me at drachs at gmail dot come right away!

Our forum engine has been upgraded to phpbb 3.0.0.  In addition, I’ve written a phpbb module that integrates the forum and wiki account databases, so a person only needs to log into the forum with their wiki account to post. (And can only log in with their wiki account)

These changes should eliminate the huge spam problem we’ve had on the forums.

It’s been alot of hard work getting frugal reef up and running, but now with wiki, forums, and blogging I believe all the technology is in place. I feel like I’ve been writing care sheet articles forever, but the site is starting to look great and it feels good to see it fleshing out.

To celebrate our grand opening, the frugal reef staff will personally research and answer the first 100 marine reef aquarium questions asked in our forum.