I’m not sure how I feel about my mother putting her Rottweiler mix, Timo, through chemotherapy. We got the results from the biopsy, and they aren’t good. Tim has the worst kind of cancer possible. The dog is no longer happy. Since her leg was removed, she seems very depressed. She is no longer interested in eating. My mom has taken to hand feeding her, hoping that she’ll pull out of it.

Besides the cancer, Timo was recently diagnosed with arthritis. She is putting a lot of stress on her 3 remaining legs. The vet had to make a house call to give her a cortisone shot. That did the trick, but I doubt that it’s more than a temporary solution.

I think that it’s time to put the dog down, but my mom isn’t ready to. My mother is putting herself through so much emotion pain. She says that she’s not ready to put Timo to sleep, but I don’t think that she’ll ever be ready. It’s hard to say goodbye.

Sure, there are a ton of dog breeds out there. The last one that she added to The Pet Wiki, was the Tibetan Mastiff. It’s an animal that is used to guard whole villages. I’ve seen books that have over 300 hundred different breeds, and that didn’t include some of those newer breeds, like Papipoo (Papillon / Poodle) or Buggs (Boston Terrier / Pug) or Labradoodle (Labrador / Poodle). She’s ready for a change.

Now she will start looking for different cat breeds to write about. I wonder what she’ll find.

She also wants to add information about dog training. She’d like to have some pictures for that. I told her about a website that I work with called 5min. They have a ton of “How to” videos, including dog training. It would make a really nice addition to her site.

Since my mother has completed writing entries for the top 50 dog breeds, she’s had to come up with new things to write for The Pet Wiki. I have never heard of a dog called a Vizsla. She has. She’s written a very interesting page for them. If I hadn’t seen it on Wikipedia, I’m sure that she made it up. Maybe it’s a conspiracy .

Although the process seemed to take forever, the dog pictures have all been added. All the pictures on the site are either from the Creative Commons or are copyright free. There are places where you can buy images on line for a couple of dollars each, but if you want a lot of pictures, it can really add up. There are a lot of really cute pictures. My favorite is still the Great Dane, but the Poodle is really cute too.

My mom has really been at it. She has almost completed writing pages for all the dog breeds on the list and only has two left. Her latest loves are Beagles. She wrote the entry for Beagles a few days ago and has added a bunch since then. Considering that she hasn’t latched on to another breed, it must be love.

I’ve been playing around with redirects on her site. It won’t have any SEO affect, but it should make for a better user experience if a user does a direct search. If a user looks up Sheltie, they with now get to the Shetland Sheepdog page.

My daughter has gotten into the act as well. She has created a logo for the site. It’s not the final logo, but it’s a good start. It’s a bit ironic that the dogs are almost done, but it’s a picture of a cat. We recently got her a digitizer, and she’s doing amazing things with it.

The link that I put a few posts ago was short lived. Although Pekingese is no longer in the search results, the number of links went up from 7 to 11. Most of those links are pages for other links, but some of them have real content. That’s new. For pages on Chesapeake Bay Retriever I can search for a string of text inside, and it turn up in Google.

Another improvement: doing a search for “wiki pet” or “pet wiki” has The Pet Wiki showing up in the first 3 or 4 links. That’s also new. The progress is slow, but it’s definately there.

Just to give a quick update, the link that I put in my last post about the Pekingese has now been indexed by Google. I have no idea how long it will stay, and I also have no idea how to keep the rest of the animals in there. I think that we are going to try buying Google Adwords to increase traffic. As soon as my mom finishes all the dogs on the list, we’ll try it out.

Well, my mom has gotten really into this wiki thing. She just completed an entry on Pugs. Now she wants one. I wonder how many dogs she’ll have by the time she finishes the Wiki .

There are some dogs that she doesn’t like. She’s a bit nervous to say anything negative about her furry friends. I keep on trying to assure her that she should be honest and tell it like it is. I doubt that the dogs themselves will care. Since it’s a wiki, if a pet owner disagrees with her, they are welcome to edit it. We’ll see how things progress.

Google has found her site. Unfortunately it’s only spidered a couple of the pages so far. As soon as the content is more complete, I think that it will be time to post it to other places.

It’s exciting to see how much work she’s done and how it’s all coming together. It should be fun.