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MOUSE NOT FOUND! . . . Hello, and welcome to the second edition of Mouse Not Found, with the latest news and views from the World Wide Web. I hope you've all found time to visit our very own website at http://www.vantasia.org; it continues to grow in popularity with over 6500 visitors to date making us one of the most popular sites for Turkish Vans on the internet. I'm also really pleased that several new homes for rescued Turks came via the website, which just goes to make it all the more worthwhile! I think its one of the best cat club websites around, but then I would say that, wouldn't I? The internet seems to be constantly in the news of late, and in particular those companies riding on the back of it, the so called "dot com" (as in .com) companies. What's actually happened is that the bubble has finally burst and many dot coms have seen their share prices tumble, and whilst those with strong financial backing can weather the storm, many others have fallen by the wayside. Even the likes of Amazon.co.uk are operating at a loss, and LetsBuyIt.com have delayed their stock market floatation as a result of falling stock prices. Of more direct concern to us is the loss of GranniesPets.co.uk and the recent merger of Petz and Pet Planet, now jointly hosted at www.PetPlanet.co.uk. This probably makes Pet Planet the largest online supplier of pet goods in the UK, although there are others if you hunt them down, for example Pet Emporium at www.PetEmporium.co.uk. As you've probably realised by now, the Internet is huge, and finding your way about can be difficult, even if you know what you're looking for. We can often guess at the web address of a particular company, for example PetsMart can be found at www.PetsMart.co.uk (which actually redirects you to their new home at www.PetsAtHome.com), but what if you're looking for a site on cat genetics for example? Unfortunately www.catgenetics.com doesn't work, so now we have to resort to the search engines. Search engines have been around on the Internet for donkey's years, originally in the form of "Archie" servers (and I'll mention "Veronica" servers too, just to be politically correct), which were simple archive search & retrieval facilities hosted mainly by academic institutions. Much has changed though, and today we'll find search facilities provided by Yahoo, AltaVista, or Lycos, to name a few, which we can use to hunt down that elusive website. There's even one specifically targeted for animal sites at www.AskBasil.com. Back to our cat genetics then, lets pay a visit to www.altavista.co.uk and enter the text "cat genetics" in the search box. After a short delay we see that it has found 340,810 UK sites that match our criteria, now that's a lot of reading! Well, we can improve on this by changing our search text to "+cat +genetics" which returns only 1516 UK site matches, and 6264 worldwide. The difference here is that we've now asked for a list of sites that contain the words "cat" and "genetics", rather that what we originally got which was "cat" or "genetics", a subtle but important difference! Even so, that's still a lot of web sites to visit, so lets be a bit more specific. This time we'll search for "+cat +genetics +piebald", yielding 4 matches on UK sites and 47 worldwide. We can now browse the list of sites by title until we find one that looks most promising, like the excellent Pigment Parade article by Lorraine Shelton at home.earthlink.net/~featherland/off/white.html. The morals of this story are (1) be sufficiently specific about what you're searching for, and (2) read the search engine help page to find out how to build more efficient search patterns. I've already mentioned a few good sites to visit above, but I'll throw in a few more for good measure! BREED CLUB Vangoran is a Swedish club for lovers of Turkish Vans and Turkish Angoras. Whilst some pages have not yet been translated into English, there's still lots of information about our favourite cats, and of course some lovely pictures. You'll find Vangoran at www.vangoran.elof.com but look out for the Union Jack symbol if you want to get the English text. VAN, TURKEY If you want to read more about the city of Van, Lake Van, and Akhtamar
Island, take a look at these sites. The first one is a general "tourist
information" page about the area, whilst the second one delves more into the
history and geography of the region. ART For a personal portrait of your favourite pet why not pay a visit to Artastic at www.artastic.co.uk where you can see brilliant examples of their work to tempt you into commissioning that extra special gift. GENERAL ADVICE For information on cat health, behaviour, and breeding, the Feline Advisory Bureau has over 50 fact sheets covering a wide range of feline illnesses, disorders, and general issues. Its definitely worth a visit at www.fabcats.org. PUBLICATIONS Cat World magazine is online at www.catworld.co.uk where you can learn about different cat breeds, advertise (for a fee), and read a selection of articles from their publications. Well that just about wraps it up for this edition of Mouse Not Found! So until next time, happy surfing!
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