History of Cyanosite

The Vintage Website

Visit this link to see the oldest surviving version of Cyanosite. Most of the site dates from 8/24/95 around the time that Cyanosite first went on-line. Many of the links no longer are active and will appear simply as underlined, bold text. Working links will be underlined, bold, and colored.


Cyanosite History

Having found such general acceptance of the website created for the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training (NSCORT) at Purdue University in 1994, the webmaster felt that a website dedicated to the research of cyanobacteria would be a valuable addition to the nascent WWW. In February of 1995, the initial development of what would become Cyanosite began. It was at the Cyanobacterial Molecular Biology Workshop held at Asilomar in June of 1995 that Cyanosite really got its start. The webspinner discussed the possibility of a cyanobacteria website with several of the participants at that meeting and found that the overall consensus was positive. In particular, Jeff Elhai (University of Richmond) was very enthusiastic about the project and agreed to help. Elhai had been single-handedly publishing a valuable newsletter for the cyanobacteriologist community, CyanoNews, for nearly a decade.

Cyanosite officially went on-line in August of 1995 on a server based in the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University. Dr. Louis Sherman, then Chairman of the Department, was and is instrumental in providing a home for Cyanosite. The early versions of Cyanosite were so bare bones that the Yahoo search engine would not list the site. By the spring of 1996, Cyanosite was developed enough to start becoming a valuable resource for cyanobacteria researchers. A link library was started and CyanoNews was put on-line in HTML format. By agreement, CyanoNews was also posted on another new server, the Toxic Cyanobacteria site, on the other side of the globe in Australia. CyanoNews is now on its own server. The Toxic Cyanobacteria site has been absorbed by Cyanosite.

In August of 1997, a major improvement to Cyanosite was made with the first offering of CyBib, a bibliography of cyanobacteria literature. This was several months in the making and again could not have been done without the help of Jeff Elhai. The original database contained over 2500 references that were presented in three different importable bibliographic formats and three different Internet-downloadable file formats. A few months later, CyBib was updated with the addition of over 1500 references. In January of 1998, CyBib v3.0 was released. This version had over 5300 citations with better coverage of 1989-90 and several thousand small formatting changes, corrections, and emendments. CyBib v3.5 was released in September 1998 with over 6700 references. CyBib v4.0 was released in June 2000 with over 11,000 references. August 2001 saw the sixth edition of the bibliography, CyBib v4.5, go online with over 12,000 references. CyBib underwent great revision in 2003. The database doubled in size to nearly 25,000 references. Perhaps more importantly, the database became searchable on-line. Users no longer have to download the database and search it on their desktop. CyBib will continue to be updated and expanded in the future.

One of original goals of Cyanosite was to provide materials that may be used in teaching students about cyanobacteria. Toward that goal, an image gallery was started in October of 1997. Roger Burks (now at UC Riverside) graciously provided nearly 100 images for publication on Cyanosite. The first cyanobacterial video was put on-line in July of 1998. The image gallery now has over 200 images. In the future, the webspinner hopes to add files with more general information about cyanobacteria. These pages will be geared towards the general public and students who may not have a background in biology or science. In addition, the future may bring a group of pages directed towards children.

As all good websites, Cyanosite continues to develop. New links are added regularly and all the links on the site are checked biannually. In August of 2001, the links library took on a new look. The links were annotated to better direct users to appropriate resources. Nearly 60 media recipes were added to Cyanosite in April 1998. Late in 2001, Cyanosite was privileged to absorb Ben Long's Toxic Cyanobacteria pages from Latrobe. Announcements for meetings, courses, books, and jobs have been placed on Cyanosite and the webspinner encourages others to submit materials for posting.

Cyanosite continues to be the premier website for cyanobacteria research. The webspinner's philosophy has always been to keep it simple and include everybody. The pages are coded in simple, hand-written HTML, without frames, banners, applets, sounds, or other distractions. Many users are not fortunate enough to have a hot on-ramp to the Internet or all the latest browsers and plug-ins. Cyanosite is utilitarian and wants to be accessible to everyone. Even with its simple code and bland design, Cyanosite has been recognized as an important site. Cyanosite was awarded inclusion in Science Central (8/10/97), was chosen Web Pick of the Day by the HMS Beagle (2/26/98), and was selected by the Internet Scout Project (2/13/98). A review of Cyanosite was published in the journal Science on 4/24/98, another review was published in Genetic Engineering News on 9/15/98, and a third in Protist in 2001. Cyanosite has also been included in the Nearctica database (9/29/98), has been given the Argus Clearinghouse seal of approval (10/2/98), was added to ISI Current Web Contents (01/10/01), was given an Artsy Award (06/23/01), and was recognized with the Dr. Matrix Science Excellence Award (05/07/02).

Cyanosite received a grant in July of 1999 from The Waksman Foundation for Microbiology. The grant supported part-time undergraduate student workers. The students were responsible for maintaining and expanding CyBib. Weblinks also were maintained by the students and short descriptions of each of the sites were added. The traffic on Cyanosite continues to increase and the webspinner is responsible for dealing with an increasing volume of email requests. Luckily, to this point, it has been a pleasure to serve the cyanobacteriologist community.

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