Welcome to a compendium of information on my particular interests in goldfish. We've had goldfish for some years and have found them to be surprisingly satisfying pets. But caring for them in an optimal manner has proven difficult. I'm learning slowly, thanks to the help of others, and will try to use this web site as a way to disseminate some of these experiences.
Hopefully, as an Internet user, you realize that anyone is free to put just about anything they want out in public as "information". I recommend you be a critical reader of information you find on the web; if it doesn't seem to make sense it may well be incorrect. That includes this web page. I know I have mistakes on this site, witting and unwitting. So use your common sense.
My opinions, as expressed on this Web page, are based on a small amount of personal experience, greatly supplemented with the communal wisdom of assorted other goldfish keepers. It should be realized that goldfish vary in their tolerance for sub-optimal conditions. Some fish will thrive in conditions that might quickly kill other, more delicate fish. In general, there are methods of keeping goldfish that will kill them right away, may eventually be fatal, or that simply will not produce optimal results over the long run. Hopefully any advice offered here will help give you the information needed to avoid being in any of these undesirable categories.
One last note; like my basement, this Web page is suffering from some "information entropy". That is, as the amount of information available increases, the level of organization decreases. I of course would like to fix this, but in the meantime it puts the burden on you, the reader, to explore the nooks and crannies to see if the info you need is here somewhere. Please read the FAQs, the basic care info, and then look at the Table of Contents. Enjoy and good luck!
As part of a recent computer upgrade and consolidation project, I pulled information off of various hard drives sitting in boxes. Lots of stuff that I did not want to lose, but no longer had easy access to. One significant element of these "Lost Files" was my old Geocities goldfish site ... I had wanted for a long time to recover those files and put them back up on the Web but always had something more pressing that needed to be done. Well, apparently the perfect moment arrived. It's done, the material is back on-line under my control.
The US Geocities hosting site was formally decommissioned by Yahoo in late 2009. My goldfish site had even at that point gotten pretty long in the tooth, seldom receiving anything more than cursory updating. My attentions had been consumed by raising a family, doing the GFSA Web site (and serving on its board), other hobbies ... in other words, living a non-Internet life. But even with the relatively static content, my site while it was up continued to receive significant traffic, with well in excess of a million site hits on the landing page (I actually don't recall the number). Some of that traffic was just the result of longevity; as goldfish sites came and went, the old URL to my site appeared in more and more places. But I'd like to at least humor myself that the content had some enduring value and interest for those entering the goldfish hobby.
Looking at my site now after its hiatus, I can be dispassionate about the whole thing. I wince reading the FAQs, my goodness, what an attitude that earlier me had. But I can also remember the endless, repetitious onslaught of emails, sometimes a 100 day asking the same questions over and over again. I had to quit, cold turkey, on answering emails a decade ago. Fortunately, there are a million places you can go now for "crowd sourced" goldfish advice. Good luck with that. The other thing is the whole look of the site. I did a Web search to catch up on the Geocities' history and noticed a service that someone has: a "Geocities-izer" that will make any Web site "look like it was designed by a 13-year old in 1996". Ouch, the truth hurts.
So I'm back. I don't expect to spend significant time on this site but I am still actively keeping goldfish and there is tons of stuff that could be added. Pond and rack system building projects, various trips to see other goldfish keepers, efforts to develop written standards for egg-fish ... I feel like I still have something to say. Oh, and maybe update the look to what a 13-year old would have done in 2006.
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