It has been a while since my last post here on the Breeder Retriever blog, but the absence of posts should not be taken as any measure of activity. In the past few months Breeder Retriever has undergone some drastic changes. First, Chris Kelly decided to leave Breeder Retriever and return to the ‘real’ working world. While it’s sad so see Chris go I believe it is equally important for everyone to be happy in what they do, and for that reason we both agreed it was for the best.

As for the website, there are a number of questions worth mentioning. First relates to the Breed Recognition Game. If you haven’t given it a try, we strongly recommend you do! To summarize, the game tests your ability to recognize breeds based on the profile image we provide. In other words you will be presented with a photo—a German Shepherd, for example—and you will also be given six options to choose from. You select the breed you think the photo depicts and move on to another breed. Once you’ve completed all 157 AKC recognized breeds your score is stored and your overall ranking is presented on the high scores page.

While the game was around in the past and I believe I blogged about it before, it has recently been greatly improved. The code was edited to make the tool run faster and more efficiently, so the load times have been greatly reduced. I hope this will make the game even more fun.

We have also added some improvements to our breed information sections, largely due to input from our visitors. Thank you to everyone who contacted us with corrections and advice!

Some under-the-hood improvements have been made to the forums as well. These changes are less noticeable but should make it more difficult for spammers to post in our forums. If you haven’t registered in the forums yet I strongly encourage you to do so and become a member of our community.

What’s coming soon? I’ve written the code for a dog book review section that will allow users as well as staff to post book reviews—but I’m not ready to post it until there are a few reviews up! So hang tight—it’ll be ready soon.

As always, if you have any suggestions or ideas that you think would make this site better, please comment here or fill out our contact form on the site. I can’t stress enough how welcome and appreciated your input is.