What is ReefLines?

My wants

I like to look at how my aquarium has been doing over time. I randomly take pictures of my corals and fish to not only be able to show off my tank, but also to look back in time and go "wow, that coral really has grown." To do this I periodically take pictures of my tank and occasionally I'll put some albums together, and scan through those pictures, looking at how everything's changed, and in particular at the growth of my corals.

Also, I'm lucky enough to have gotten lots of frags from people (friends, at frag swaps, ...). Depending where a frag comes from, I don't really know all the the proper names for it, how it'll look in my tank or what to actually expect from that particular piece. And as those corals change in my tank (normally from small and cool to big and brown), I wonder, "what does this look like in the original tank?"

Really, those are different versions of the same thing, tracking livestock over time. I want to see how my livestock has changed, and I want to see how it compares to others. In particular, I'd really like to know how my lowly frag compares to the original colony. And while I'm at it, I want to go across other people's tanks/pictures and see how their similar livestock does.

Nutshell

So in a nutshell, simplifying those processes is the core of ReefLines. ReefLines is meant to:

Lineage

Drilling into the lineage idea a little more -- I personally want to know a lot about the animals I keep. Focusing on my corals, when I get a new coral I first do some planning, but afterwards I try and keep some sort of record of what I have in my tank, such as when I got it (at least taking a couple pictures). I started keeping some spreadsheets and using some online databases to keep a record of what I have in the tank, but honestly, updating a file of "Sunset Monti acquired on 6-7-2009" is boring. It's great to have that info, but gathering that info and just having a bunch of text isn't really a sexy enough activity to keep me interested long-term. And it also takes a lot of work to track that down, work that others have probably done better than I have.

Information sharing

If I have a record of my livestock, and you have a record of your livestock, why don't we save some work for the next guy and let him see what we've acquired. This idea is another goal of my vision into what this site should be:
  1. I enter in some pictures and information about my corals
  2. You do the same
  3. We can now see how each other's corals are doing, and what information we've gathered
  4. The next guy comes along and enters his coral, and can leverage our information to raise his coral better, while simultaneously giving us some more data about what different conditions do to a coral
  5. Somebody else flips through those pictures and decides to get a blue spotlight for his, since yours looks outstanding with it

Or how about:

That's it

So that's ReefLines. Give it a try and send me your feedback. And feel free to help me get some color back in my brown corals.

Richie