Crittersnaps! And Kittenwars

Our Crittersnaps! press release went out yesterday via PRWeb. I just checked the statistics, and we've had 25,909 page views so far, 49.5% from the United States.

I've been looking at all of the new blog-related search engines, etc. From Technorati to Furl to del.icio.us. It's all quite bewildering. In the midst of all of this I found a funny website that is both different, and similar, to Crittersnaps!

It's called Kittenwars. Each page displays two kittens, and you click the one you think will win a fight. It then tells you, a bit like Crittersnaps!, how others have voted. In the FAQ's on the website one of the questions is:

Can I have the Kittenwar code?

No. Sorry, Kittenwar will be firmly closed-source for the foreseeable future. Please don't e-mail us asking to make an exception, because we won't. It was custom coded for kittens anyway, and you'd get all kinds of horrible errors if you tried to use it to measure the relative cuteness of other things.

I'm more of a dog person than kitten person, but I still picked my favourites in a couple of the kitten "virtual" battles.

I also had a quick look at the www.hotornot.com website. I see that when you post your photo, you automatically get the code to add a button to your blog, webpage, and even (presumably) your HTML e-mail to tell your friends that they can vote for you. This seems like a good idea, and hopefully we can do a similar thing on Crittersnaps! in the weeks and months ahead.

To see how it works, please give Marjorie a vote. (Note that I didn't post my own picture. That would really be ugly.)

Sunday 20 August 2006

This was my first visit. I settled right in and enjoyed everything. Can't wait for my next visit in December - Ebony
We've been coming here since October 2005 and wouldn't stay anywhere else.

New Crittersnaps! Website

We have one Guernsey cow, Carole. We milk her each day, by hand, so we can have fresh Channel Islands milk on the farm. I became involved with the English Guernsey Cattle Society and set up their website. Along the way I was asked to create a "virtual show" where eight cattle photos were posted each month --- cattle from all over the world --- and Guernsey enthusiasts were asked to rank them 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.

There were no prizes --- only braggin' rights. And those didn't go to the cow who came in first, but to the person who came closest to the "correct" rankings.

This gave me the idea of creating another type of "virtual" show --- and instead of restricting it to Guernsey cattle, I wanted to include all types of animals. Cows and dogs, cats and rabbits, alpacas and goats.

Instead of ranking the critters, visitors would be asked to rate each animal on a scale of 1 to 10. In other words, it's a bit like www.hotornot.com and a bit like a cattle virtual show.

We asked some talented database programmers in India to work on this, at Epitome Technologies. The website was designed for us by Jeff Clark at the Vacant Canvas in Boston. Jeff has done several great websites for us already, including our main dog hotel website and our Berkshire - Tamworth pig website. (He's also created a fun website for us, Rear Admirable.) Lisa Haller of the Dancing Nomad came up with the Crittersnaps! name, and wrote the snappy copy.

The new Crittersnaps! website took us all about six or seven months to create. We're going "live" tomorrow, September 12, 2006, when we distribute a press release via PRWeb.

We hope that visitors will enjoy dropping in to vote when they have a few minutes. Visitors can either vote on random critters --- or can narrow the search to a particular type of animal (dogs, cats, etc.) or type/breed, or type/breed/gender.

To upload a photo, registration is necessary. There's a small charge of US $2.50 to upload an image. This will pay for a unique, fixed URL for the image. And statistics on the voting on your dog, cat, cow, etc. There is also a "meet me" facility where folks can meet each other, with the consent of both.

I hope folks will visit the Crittersnaps! website and have fun voting.