23. 4. 2010

Check out the new galleries "Jardines de la Reina". This remote place is Cuba's best diving site and since many years strictly protected. I added separate galleries for the Caribbean Reef Sharks and the Silky Sharks which are abundand in this spectacular place. I still need to identify many of the species in the pictures and update the data base.

6. 3. 2010

The "Equipment" pages have been updated.

29. 11. 2009

The database has been updated. Now all 1256 pictures are searchable. There are 330 different species in the database, most from the Caribbean.

10. 11. 2009

A short page about the lionfish invading Cuban reefs has been added.

7. 11. 2009

The new galleries of August and September 2009 are added: Havana II and Maria La Gorda II. The species in these galleries are not yet searchable, I have to update the database.

5. 8. 2009

Major change in the galleries. The Turning Gate (TTG) Highslide Gallery is used to generate the galleries in Lightroom. The visual effect is similar to Flash, but without using a Flash plug- in since TTG Highslide is based only on HTML and JavaScript. The engine behind the TTG Highslide Gallery is based on Highslide JS which I also use on several pages (e. g. for the Search Results page).

The "Species Search" has been replaced by "Taxa Search" which allows to search the complete taxonomic tree of all species in the database. Thumbnails with examples of each class, family, order etc. are shown to make it easier to find specific species.

25. 6. 2009

The search function has been improved.

2. 6. 2009

The "Science and the Reef" has been modified. Still not much content, but I don't have as much time as I wished.

17. 04. 2009

The search menu has been extended. You can now select between "Name Search" and "Species Search". The new "Species Search" shows you thumbnails of representative species ordered by scientific classification (order or family). If you click it you will get all pictures of species of this order or family in the galleries. So far, only fishes have been implemented.

05. 04. 2009

New galleries "Cuba 2009" have been added.
The design of the web site has been improved.
The search function has been improved. In the results page you get also Class and Order of the species found in the database.

25. 11. 2008

An external search via the WoRMS (World Register of Marine Species) database has been implemented. The "Science and the Reef" has been improved a little bit.

20. 11. 2008

The search function has been extended. Now, species assigned in all the galleries can be searched. A preview is shown in thumbnails.

11. 11. 2008

Now you can "Search the Reef". You can search common or scientific names of the species in the pictures. Programming in MySQL/PHP was painful, but now its working. So far, I added only the data (from the metadata of the pictures) of the 2008 galleries. The others will follow as soon as I have time.

24. 10. 2008

Gallery Islas Medas added. These tiny islands at the Costa Brava in Spain are protected and show how rich the Mediterranean Sea once was.

17. 09. 2008

Gallery Grevelingenmeer added. Although the visibility was very low I got a couple of nice pictures of lobsters.

16. 09. 2008

First page of Chemistry of the Reef added. In future I plan to add more discussions of chemical processes of importance to coral reefs. I also added some information "about me".

02.05.2008

Maria la Gorda info added.

20. 04. 2008

Several pages updated.

18. 04. 2008

New 2008 galleries added: Havana, Bay of Pigs/Playa Larga, Maria La Gorda

I did not yet have time to identify the creatures in the Bay of Pigs and Maria La Gorda galleries.