Terry is on vacation for the next three weeks so I’ve
volunteered to write this month’s Editorial. For those of you who don’t know, I
am the web developer for Advanced Aquarist’s
Online Magazine and have been doing so since mid-2003.

A picture of R.florida in my 38 gallon reef tank.

My involvement with the hobby started back in late
1999 with a small 38 gallon reef tank. Since that short time ago, I’ve seen the
hobby bloom in many ways including huge inroads into the online areas with
discussion boards, email lists, chat, online courses, etc, being created and
ran by hobbyists and professionals alike. These areas are facilitating
information exchange between amateur marine aquarists, experienced marine
aquarists, and the scientists that are researching these areas. The rate of
information exchange has been amazing and I’d like to think that Advanced Aquarist has played a part in the advancement of
the hobby through this venue.

Along these lines, I’d like to talk a bit about what’s
in store for you in this issue. This month, we have three Feature Articles. The
first Feature Article, authored by Terry Bartelme,
continues his discussion on fish acclimation procedures in his article titled
“Updating Marine Teleost Fish Acclimation Procedures: Part 2.” This
particular article centers on Terry’s recommendations for updating our
acclimation procedures with regulation of pH, lighting, salinity, and other
conditions. Terry goes into great detail citing relevant sources for his
recommendations. The next two Feature Articles discuss another pressing issue:
the reproduction and propagation of corals in the aquarium trade. Lee Goldman,
in his article titled “Growing Coral from Sexually Produced Larvae; It’s
the ‘r’ight Way to Conserve Coral Reefs, but More ‘K’nowledge is Needed” discusses the sexual
reproduction of species and how harnessing this could benefit the hobby and the
world’s reefs. Ron’s thoughts on this subject are interesting and timely.
Mike Paletta discusses coral fragging in his article
titled “The ‘Fragging’ Phenomenon.” Mike
discusses proper fragging techniques, frag tank
setup, and frag swaps. Adam Blundell continues his series on “Tide
Pools” and the relationship between tide pools and humans. This
particular article contains a large number of photos — too much in fact to
show 100% of them. However, they are all provided in the article’s photo album
so be sure to check it out while reading the article. The issue is then rounded
out with another “What in neptune‘s World?,” “Hot Tips on Nano
Reefkeeping”, and our RSS syndicated column “Reefs in the News.”

Coral frags growing in a reef tank. Photo from Mike Paletta’s article The Fragging Phenomenon.

While on the topic of the magazine, I want to remind
everyone of some of the many improvements and features we have available to our
readers, some of which have recently been implemented:

• Ease of Navigation: Navigation box allows for easy reading of back
  issues and makes it much easier to find back issues than before.
• Search (both Simple and Advanced): Allows
  you to specify as little or as much search power as you want. We’ve
  recently upgraded our search engine to allow you to search for specific Authors or specific Columns.
• RSS Syndication: RSS feeds for Published Articles, Search Terms (RSS button at the top of every Search page), and Reefs in the News.
  What
  is RSS?
• Email Notification of
  Published Articles: Allows you to subscribe to our mailing list if you
  prefer to use email instead of RSS for publication notification.
• Standards
  Compliance: AdvancedAquarist.com validates
  as Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This means better browser
  compatibility and better accessibility for our readers.
• Accessibility:
  AAOLM plays nice with screen readers and comes with Access Keys for
  navigation.
• Photo Albums: Most
  articles have photo albums associated with them making it easy for you to
  see all the photos at a glance.
• Pretty print:
  Printouts of articles styled for ease of reading.
• Related content: At
  the bottom of every article. Shows what articles are related to the
  article you’ve just read.
• Author Forums
  Links: Located at the bottom of every article. Allows you to interact with
  our Authors.
• Keyword Listings:
  At the top of every article. Click a keyword to see what other content has
  been tagged with that keyword.
• Google Toolbar Search and RSS Feed: If you are using Internet Explorer v.6 or greater and have the latest Google Toolbar installed, you can click this link
  and install our toolbar button.  This button allows you to search
  our site from the Google Toolbar and it also lists our RSS feed from
  its dropdown menu.
• Firefox
  Integration: The Dictionary
  Search and custom AAOLM
  Search Engine Plugin allow you to search
  AdvancedAquarist.com from your browser without even being on our site.
• Send Page to a
  Friend: At the top of every article. Quickly send a friend a short note
  about the article you’ve read.
• del.icio.us Bookmarking:
  At the top of every article. Allows you to add this article to your del.icio.us bookmarks. What is del.icio.us?

All of these features (and more forthcoming) are made
possible by us migrating the magazine to the Plone content management system in mid-2005. We
are still in the midst of migrating our back issues
and hope to have these moved over in the next several months. In the mean time,
you can still access all of the old issues on our old site by following the
provided links in our Navigation box.

As always, we are interested in your feedback either
via email
or in our Editorial
forum. Also if you haven’t already done so, please feel free to make a donation
to the magazine via our Paypal link. The magazine is
provided for you to read online free of charge and has been funded by our many advertisers (thank
you!). Every cent helps us improve the magazine and you can help with your
contribution.

I hope that everyone enjoys this issue!