For a very good guide to all sorts of dog training processes and dog behavior challenges, I use and recommend Clickertraining ...that link goes to the description of this terrific ebook you download immediately, wherever you are! -- Rosana

I ‘ve just finished going through the my main website, www.training-dogs.com, and revising any pages that needed it. I do this once a year. Last year I did a huge revision so there wasn’t a lot to do this time. One main change I’ve done is on the menu at the main site — It was several levels deep and enough of a nuisance to revise that I sometimes put new pages up on the site, didn’t get them on the menu, so nobody ever found them!

So now the menu is just what you see here…. this is just a picture of it so the links don’t work. When you are at the main site, clicking on any of those topics will take you to a page called “What’s in this section?” with a descriptive list of the pages on that topic. Sometimes I have linked to an appropriate category here in the blog, or even to a particular blog article on some aspect of dog training if I thought it was an important enough page.

Not long ago, a Mac user told me that the menu was blocking part of the text on the pages. I had no idea. I *think* I have fixed that, but if you have that problem, please do let me know!

Next, I’ll be revising the blog.

I have plans to change the format of the blog. I should be able to do this without you seeing what I am up to till it’s all done, thanks to a handy Wordpress plugin. But I haven’t tried the plugin yet. If you turn up at the blog and it looks really strange, figure I am just doing some testing!

The new blog layout will be what’s called magazine style and I hope we will all like it! It will make it easier to find things in the original section of the site too.

Much more “Web 2.0″ — what’s that?

This website gets between 700 and 800 people a day visiting it, and I was amused in doing my reorganizing to find a blog post from a few years ago where I was thrilled that it had jumped from 125 a day to 275. That’s people, a much smaller number than “hits” since one person can generate a bunch of hits.

Well, I’d really like to have a lot more people coming here, given how much work I put into this! And more importantly really, how useful the information can be to dog owners. I usually rank #1 at google for the phrase “training dogs” but doggone it (pardon the expression), no matter what I have done so far I rank very low for the much-more-searched phrase “dog training.” Just checked and today I am #220 for that phrase. Doesn’t get me any traffic, I’m sure! It’s some consolation that I rank #16 for “dogs training” and #1 for “dog training methods” and am in the top rankings for a bunch of other phrases. (I don’t check this by hand… there is software that does it.)

Here’s where web 2.0 comes in…

You may or may not have heard this expression but it refers to the fact that more and more internet users are connecting with each other in a variety of applications like Facebook (which has a plugin for your dog called Dogbook), Dogster, Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, delicio.us, stumbleupon, and many others. On these sites, people communicate with each other about all sorts of things from where they walked their dog to their favorite pages on dog training.

Bit by bit, I’m using these sites more, to connect with other dog owners. Just today I watched a great dog video at Youtube and read reviews of a fascinating dog training book due to comments on twitter and another group I’m on. These will become topics in later blog posts. If you twitter, do sign up to follow me (trainingdogs) and I will do the same with you.

So in a nutshell web 2.0 gets us away from relying so much on the big search engines for finding our information. I have already started a series of articles on other dog websites that I like, and I will be doing more of these. If you have a website related in some way to positive dog training methods, let me know and I will look at it. I don’t do link lists anymore, but if I find something interesting on your site, I may blog about it.

Every now and then I get a question about agility, and I really know very little about it. So I was delighted to find this blog post on getting started with agility. Here’s the url:http://blog.johannthedog.com/2007/12/foundation-skills-for-agility.html

It’s a long read, but inspiring in terms of dogs and people connecting, even if you AREN’T planning any agility training yourself.

Here’s a bit I liked:

On the first day after Mum adopted me at 12 weeks, I learned my first foundation skill. I didn’t know it then, because agility wasn’t even a twinkle in my eye. But that foundation skill has been very important in every run and every class and every practice we have done in agility in the past three years.

What was the skill?

I’ll leave that question hanging in the air. If you do go to the blog, the question is answered a little ways down from the top.

By the way, I found this because “Johann the Dog” is one of the people, umm, dogs, I follow at Twitter, an enjoyable social networking site. There’s a link to it on every page of my blog.

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Technorati Tags: agility training,social networking dogs

Yesterday I was out most of the day, so it was late afternoon by the time I got to my email. Surprise! Our Rottweiler Lola had been chosen Dog of the Day at Dogster.com! It’s been barely a month since we joined it, and there are many thousands (someone said 30,000) of dogs there.

Here’s a part of the homepage of Dogster yesterday:

I don’t know why we were chosen. I poked around Dogster a bit to try to find out how they choose dogs of the day, but didn’t see anything. This photo shows her by our kitchen door, and I have a short text about how I clicker trained her (once was all it took) to pull on a rope and enter the kitchen. Maybe she got picked because it’s a nice story.

So for whatever reason it happened, I’m happy. Maybe it will increase awareness of clicker training.

While I was busy poking around Dogster before dinner, Lola was outside being a very bad dog. She had just figured out how to pull carrots out of their little garden bed, over the too-short fencing, and she had herself quite a feast. Guess that was her way of celebrating! Kelly changed the fencing even before his morning tea today.

Come visit Lola at Dogster!

[tags]social networking for dogs, clicker training dogs[/tags]

“Social Networking” is a relatively new, and ever-more-important aspect of the internet. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and many more create ways that we can connect with others who share our interests.

And the dogs have their own social networking site. I can tell it’s for them because most of the posts are written by the dogs, referring to their owners usually as Mom!

It’s Dogster. Free to join, full of things to do… Lola and LarryDog have joined, but I admit we don’t get there as much as they would like, since their messages have to be channeled through me… now if they could type, it would be different!

I really like the way Dogster has defined what it is and isn’t.

• It IS a place to have fun with other dogs and their owners, a place to have good discussions in the forums and to post favorite photos of your dogs.
• It ISN’T a place to promote dogs for sale, breeding services, or other things for sale.
• It ISN’T a place to discuss non-dog matters such as politics and religion.
• It ISN’T a place to post other people’s videos (like from Youtube) or photos… all content must be yours.
• It ISN’T a place for cats, except as they relate to dogs, but there is a Catster.

Come join us there… and be sure to click to make Lola one of your Pup Pals! (LarryDog doesn’t get online nearly as much as Lola.)

[tags]dogster, dog social networking[/tags]