What The Cat Dragged In
Documenting the catches of two house cats in 2010
Twitter for updates on new catches | Flickr for full size pictures and info | Home for the juicy statistics
About
Our house has 2 cats (and 3 children, but that's another story...). Lately, they seem to be getting more and more prolific as catchers. There's plenty of mice locally (we're less than a mile from farmland in rural Surrey) and they sadly bring in the occasional bird as well.
We decided that 2010 would be the year we start documenting their catches. My mother in law had previously operated a similar (offline) project "Catskill", which provided the inspiration for much of the project. The front page is where all the stats are, you can see the catches on flickr, and be updated about latest catches on twitter too.
We decided that 2010 would be the year we start documenting their catches. My mother in law had previously operated a similar (offline) project "Catskill", which provided the inspiration for much of the project. The front page is where all the stats are, you can see the catches on flickr, and be updated about latest catches on twitter too.
Rosie
Rosie Cotton is a long haired black and white moggie. She's named after one of the few female hobbits mentioned in Lord of The Rings because of her excessively hairy feet. She's placid, a bit of a lap cat and not a great one for catching things. We suspect that nearly all the catches in the house are brought in by her daughter, Minky-Minky. She has hilariously long white whiskers.
Both cats were rescued in about 2004 from a man who had kept an insane amount of unneutered cats in his house to the extent where he could not look after them all. They are fantastic cats & brilliant with the kids.
Both cats were rescued in about 2004 from a man who had kept an insane amount of unneutered cats in his house to the extent where he could not look after them all. They are fantastic cats & brilliant with the kids.
Minky
Slinky Malinki was blacker than black,
A stalking and lurking, adventurous cat.
He had bright yellow eyes and a warbling wail,
And a kink at the end of her very long tail.
Minky-Minky is a short haired moggie with just a few white hairs at the centre of her chest. She's Rosie's daughter. Her name is taken from the book "Slinky Malinki" by Lynley Dodd. When our eldest son was about 2, he would call the book "Minky minky". When we subsequently had the two cats, Minky fit the desription perfectly, so the name stuck.
Tech 1
Only of interest to the geeks, these bits:
Photos are taken with my Nokia 5800 phone, uploaded to PixelPipe via Nokia Share Online. I use this method over email/mms because adding tags is a tap of the button, so defining the cat, status, location and victim is a single click. No need to type in tags I've already used. Also at home I'm on my wifi network so no data charges are incurred.
Pixelpipe sends the picture and info to flickr.
Photos are taken with my Nokia 5800 phone, uploaded to PixelPipe via Nokia Share Online. I use this method over email/mms because adding tags is a tap of the button, so defining the cat, status, location and victim is a single click. No need to type in tags I've already used. Also at home I'm on my wifi network so no data charges are incurred.
Pixelpipe sends the picture and info to flickr.
Tech 2
A Yahoo pipe polls the flickr api for latest photos from the flickr account. It searches the html source of the photo page for the short flic.kr url, performs some regex and string concatenaion on the tags and pops it all into a title field of an outputted rss feed.
Twitterfeed takes the rss feed and sends it to twitter, unchanged.
Twitterfeed takes the rss feed and sends it to twitter, unchanged.
Tech 3
The webpage here uses jQuery JSON calls to the flickr api to update the page on each load.
Read the source of this site and you'll see I'm no expert at programming, but I've had fun getting to know a few more interesting things about jQuery and AJAX during the making of the site. Suggestions for code clean up or features always welcome! (twitter is best, but works too).
Read the source of this site and you'll see I'm no expert at programming, but I've had fun getting to know a few more interesting things about jQuery and AJAX during the making of the site. Suggestions for code clean up or features always welcome! (twitter is best, but works too).