Amano - For those who have been in this hobby for only a short time to those who have years of experience, the name Takashi Amano represents natural aquariums at their finest. Most can only say they’ve seen pictures of his tanks. The lucky ones have had the opportunity to see them in person. I was one of the lucky ones. After college, I went backpacking in Japan. Being in this hobby for only a few months, I knew already that I couldn’t pass up the chance to see Takashi Amano’s tanks in person. So I took the 2 1/2 hour BulletTrain ride from Tokyo to Niigata to see them in person. Here are the pictures I took….

Natural Aquarium World This is the first book of a series from Amano. The pictures of his tanks are simply amazing. With each picture he includes a detailed description of each tank.

Natural Aquarium World 2 With this 2nd book, he continues where he left off - with more amazing pictures of natural aquariums and detailed descriptions. It’s a must-have!

Natural Aquarium World 3 You can’t just own one Amano book. The 3rd book from Amano is just as incredible as the last two. Every tank is completely different. You have to see it for yourself! It’s totally worth it.

The store is located in the most random area. The area is very rural. There are no other stores and the bus only comes around every hour and a half.	The closest thing in the store to a reptile were these HUGE turtles. Thought they were giant stones at first.
The store is divided into two sections; one for the fish/plants and one for his products.	This is a picture of the other side of the store. All the tanks on the walls looked like lil’ natural aquariums. Imagine going to your LFS and all the tanks are amano-style. neat.
This is the from across the street. As you can see, it’s not a very big building nor a very modern one.

The following pictures are pictures I took at the fish store. These are unfinished tanks in the store that were mostly I think used for storage or minor display tanks.

A visitor left this comment the other day that got me thinking about our MFT logo. He wrote:

I have only one suggestion! It would be great if you replace the bowl from your logo with a fish tank! Reasons behind this are, (1) Your site is ‘My Fish Tank’, not ‘My Fish Bowl’, and (2) Most Importantly, bowls are no good for fishes, except small labyrinths like Betta etc. and all fish lover aquarists should discourage people from keeping the poor fishes in tiny bowls!

I always viewed our logo as a funny logo which reminded me of back in the days when fishes were really put into bowls. sorta like a retro-logo i guess. but i’m having trouble getting a higher quality version of the logo and that comment got me thinking….do you think MFT needs a new logo?

*update* win a mascot at BloggingTips.com

For 7 years MFT was hosted by this one hosting company. Things were good for the first couple of years as MFT was just a tiny fish in the big pond. Soon MFT got more popular and we started to get more people to join our online community. That’s when things went bad. so bad that even a few of the members here had the direct line to their support team. haha! their favorite saying was: i’ll just reboot the server.

So I found a new hosting company that had great settings for MFT and they even offered to move it for free! Me being as non-techy as possible when it comes to these things happily agreed. 2 weeks of ridiculous back and forth with their support staff drove me insane….for example…

me: the server is not working. i can’t see my forum.
(one day later) - staff: yes. your site is not working because the shinbone does not connect to the thigh bone (okay..it was some other techy term that i didn’t understand but you get the point).
(immediately after receiving it) - me: okay…can you fix it then.
(one more day later) - staff: You need to *do this and do that and then etc etc*.
me: i need to kick you in the….

anyways…2 weeks of that drove me insane. i left and found a new hosting company that was more expensive but their staff was way more responsive. with the help of a good friend, i was able to move MFT to it’s new home yesterday. hopefully this will be the last and final move and i can concentrate on adding more stuff to MFT.

so there you have it…moral of the story? 3rd time’s the charm!

a cool feature of this blog is that it allows you to interact with whatever I write about. There is a comment link (says “No Comment” for the example below that you can click on and leave a comment. Here’s a visual aid in case you can’t see it.

now this isn’t your ordinary basic commenting system. what we have here a brand-spankin’ new commenting system. Normally when you leave a comment, it just gets inserted in the order they were made. So if you were trying to respond to a comment in comment spot #2 and your comment response is in slot #120, who’s going to know what you’re talking about by the time they scroll down to your comment?

soooooo, if you look at the visual aid below, you’ll notice next to each comment there is a link that says “reply to this comment”. This will insert your comment right below so we’ll have a coherent commenting section.

so hopefully you guys know you can leave comments to me or to each other (but keep it nice!). This should be fun!

Surprise! Hello everyone and welcome to the new MFT. Everything is the same as before except for a few changes that you might notice and might not.

Might Have Noticed:
- New homepage look
- What is this blog thing on the homepage?
- hopefully less downtime on the server

Might Not Have Noticed:
- Moved to a new server
- Upgraded our forum to the newest version
- The shadows under my eyes from lack of sleep

Things To Add (partial list):
- put the top 10 newest threads of the forum back on the homepage
- for IE users, there’s that weird light blue bar at the top that needs to be fixed.
- more stuff..can’t think of it right now.
- any other suggestions?

But the most important change is this blog on the homepage. MFT was created as a personal website for me to write and post pictures about my tank and that was it. But I realized that I could create something that hopefully everyone could participate and enjoy and I went that way instead.

Back in the beginning, with a few members it was easy to communicate and get to know everyone but now with such a large and excellent community of fish friends, I feel that having this blog will allow all of you to get to know me a bit better and vice versa.

I’m still working on adding alot more stuff here but whether or not you’re a new or old visitor, welcome to MFT and I hope you enjoy your stay here!

~ Johnny