Reef keepers, along with research by scientists, keep refining our understanding of the nuances of the biochemical elements of our hobby. And, though there are still some animals that have yet to be successfully kept in our reef aquaria – Dendronepthya sp., for example – we have become pretty good at it. In fact, the challenge of reef keeping may have become a wee bit routine. So, in the next issue (March 2009) of Advanced Aquarist, we will publish an article on maintaining a temperate aquarium.

Some of you reef keepers may be thinking, why bother? Let me show you some pictures from a coming article in March to answer that question.

New Magazine Features

One of the things that we have noticed over the years is how our articles spawn interesting discussions in the online forums where a lot of thought provoking dialog takes place about the topic. One example would be Ken Feldman’s excellent protein skimmer performance article from the January 2009 issue. We noticed a lot of great discussions going on in the online communities about this article and how it will impact future protein skimmer performance and innovation. This discussion is great! On the flip side, though, it does lead to a somewhat fragmented and broken discussion on the topic as people that frequent one discussion forum may not read a similar thread on a separate forum and thereby may miss out on some interesting tidbit of information. To attempt to address this observation, as of this issue we have enabled comments on all of our articles.

Our new comments system is powered by IntenseDebate, a WordPress/Automatix owned application, and has been used on many high-profile websites such as President Barak Obama’s Change.gov. Some of the features include:

• Threaded Questions
• RSS feeds for both individual comments and all comments
• Receive notice via email that someone’s made a comment

And if you choose to register with IntenseDebate, you can:

• Register with your OpenID or the normal signup procedure
• Get/Post comments by email
• Use Gravatars
• Have commenter profiles
• Reputation points and comment voting
• And more!

We’ve wanted to implement comments for quite some time and we encourage our readers to comment away! A screenshot of the new commenting system (and a new social bookmarking widget) can be seen below:

New commenting system and a more useful bookmarking app are implemented at the end of articles.

Coming Next Month at Reefs.org

Reefs.org is expected to roll out a much more powerful bulletin board software next month, with a lot of improvements in performance and functionality. Stay tuned!