As part of our wills, Melanie and I had to consider the future survival of ChessieDB. Steve Larouche, a friend of ours who's active in the local Chessie community, has agreed to take over the hosting and maintenance of ChessieDB should anything happen to us. We've created an MS-Word document to outline the import/export procedures for the database, a compressed backup is available for Steve to download, and another backup is located in a bank safety deposit box. Hopefully all these precautions will never be needed. :-)

A special thanks to Adam Levert, who sent us an e-mail to let us know about Chesapeake Bay Retrievers, Decoys, and Long Guns: Tales of Carroll's Island Ducking Club -- a new book published in April 2008 about Chesapeake Bay Retrievers.

I just finished adding a new Network-Attached Storage (NAS) file server with 4 Terabytes of disk to our local network. I've also moved all of our music, video, pictures, websites, documents, etc. onto the NAS, and I'm now fine-tuning the file and directory structure. You'll notice the number of pending submissions has been growing for the past week or two. Hopefully the integration of this new storage will be finished shortly, and we can once again import new submissions.

A little while ago, I started work on a breeder contact database. It's still in the works, and most of the back-end is done, but I have to figure out a good way for website users to connect breeders to dogs. While I'm pondering this problem, I'll probably finish some other features, like searching for breeders, displaying breeder contact information, and a form to change a breeder's contact info.

If you received an error saying "Sorry, the saved submission information was incomplete. Please re-submit a new form." during the e-mail validation process, please try the link provided in the e-mail again. Hopefully everything should work as it should now. :-) If you have any problems, please e-mail us. Thank you.

I'm working on a new database to manage breeder and owner contact information. This information will be displayed on the Dog's Info page. You can see an example on Donnett's Pepper Pete Info Page. Don't worry - e-mail addresses are encoded in javascript to protect them from harvesting. :-) If you've submitted a dog to our database, and identified yourself as it's breeder, you're name and e-mail address has been added to our breeder database. An online form will be available in the future to update your contact information. For now, if you find a dog has been attributed to you by error, send us an e-mail and we'll correct the problem. The search page will also be enhanced soon to search and display breeder contact information, including a list of dogs attributed to them.

The ChessieDB has just reached a new milestone -- we have over 20,000 dogs in the exported database! Thank you to Melanie, who's been entering paper-based pedigrees donated by Janet Wilson, and everyone else submitting pedigrees online.

FYI - I just finished fixing two minor bugs in the submission process. First, if multiple submissions were made re-using the same submission form (using the back button after submitting a dog, to submit another dog), the original submitted info was overwritten - the submission form contains a unique ID for each submission, and this ID is used to save the submitted info. I've added a check to the submission process that will now protect previously submitted info, even if has the same submission ID. This could only happen if someone used the back button, after submitting a dog, to re-submit another. Hopefully this wasn't a problem experienced by many.

The second bug fixed occured when using the "Update Info" link when viewing a dog's info page. The original photo for the dog was not displayed on the submission form, and updates to the photo may have been ignored.

So, hopefully everything is working fine now, but if you experience any problems, please let us know.

I expect to start work on improving the search form (adding extra fields for sex, dates, etc.) in the next few weeks.

I've added a new Pedigree stats line at the bottom of each pedigree page. Hopefully this will be useful as you work towards expanding your dogs pedigree. For example, when retrieving Donnett's Pepper Pete's 11 generation pedigree, the following stats are provided: 630 unique dogs out of 2035 listed, from a possible maximum of 2047 (12 dogs missing).

New submissions have been pilling up for the last few weeks. We're just back from vacation, so we'll be importing them very soon. Our dog broke 2 teeth while we were away - probably gnawing at some chain-link fence at the kennel - so we've been busy doing some research on root canals and crowns since getting back. We're meeting the animal dentist tomorrow morning, so hopefully we'll have more time for the ChessieDB in the coming days.

In the future - probably this fall or winter - I hope to add a litter submission form, a kennel submission form (allowing you to specify the breeding kennel for a dog, search for kennels, etc.), and possibly a classified ads section for breeders and kennels.

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The new document section has been inaugurated with several pedigrees sent to us by Austin Reed. We're especially excited to see Annie (1896-06-20), Beaver (1902-07-19), and Beaver III's pedigrees. Much of the information available around the turn of the century can be inaccurate, so it's nice to see real pedigrees from this time. We've already found a few errors in our database. It'll take a while to analyse and incorporate these pedigrees. We have to make sure we weed out duplicates and/or identically named dogs. There are also several old pedigrees in the documents donated by Janet and Don of Donnett's Kennels. These will eventually be scanned and added to our online documents collection.