This blog is in no way officially associated with TinyKittens, People for Happier Cats, or any of the people officially involved with those organizations.
It is merely a labour of love and OCD from an avid follower.
Background:
I’ve watched Shelly’s live cams off and on since at least the Jungle kittens. (I found Ustream’s ads too annoying to watch live very often, but I did watch clips uploaded to YouTube for the early fosters.) It wasn’t until Calypso and her endless pregnancy that I really started to watch regularly. By the time the multi-generational Roundup litter arrived in the summer of 2014, I was watching steadily and was hooked.
Still, it wasn’t until 2015 that I started to track information for my own use in a journal (in particular during the week that the Zoo Kittens — five kittens who unfortunately had FIP when they were found at the Vancouver Zoo and brought in to LAPS — died). It looked a little like this:
Paper tracking quickly became unworkable. But a blog is a perfect tool for that kind of information gathering — I can add feeds, screencaps, embedded videos, links, and extra information easily here that expand the usefulness of the content; and everything is much more accessible and searchable.
This site started out with lofty ambitions: to provide a daily recap of everything cat-related happening at Langley Animal Protection Society (LAPS) and TinyKittens. That worked for awhile, though it was way too easy to get behind. When Shelly started her leave of absence from TinyKittens late in 2016, the flow of information changed. (The flow of information from LAPS changed around the same time as personnel and priorities changed there.) It became harder to sustain any kind of daily update for either organization.
On September 30, 2017, in an effort to make updating everything more sustainable, I marked all of the existing daily recaps ‘private” and changed the focus of the site from TinyKittens and LAPS to just TinyKittens and from daily recaps to a compilation of informational pages. (See announcement post.) Early in 2018, I resumed recaps but as briefer monthly pages rather than daily pages. In November 2018, I made the previous daily recap pages public again as it was taking me longer than I’d planned to pull out the information in them to create comparable monthly pages. (Those daily recap pages still contain LAPS updates.)
About content sources:
- The text updates come from watching the live feeds (including the VIP feed) and from text updates on the various social media pages and live stream chats. (Note to anyone who cares: Information obtained from the VIP stream is not secret unless Shelly specifically indicates that something shouldn’t be shared. Yes, the VIP stream is only available to paying subscribers, but doesn’t make it secret.)
- Embedded videos come from a variety of YouTube accounts (including but not limited to Little Darling’s, Kimsies’, Shelly’s, and my own gwendelk account), Facebook pages, and Instagram accounts — all of the embedded videos allow you to easily go directly to the original pages for those videos. (YouTube embeds allow you to easily see whose account those embeds come from, and you can click through to watch the videos directly on that YouTube channel. Same with Facebook and Instagram feeds.)
- Pictures are generally screencaps taken by me from the live feeds (including VIP) or videos. (Occasionally, someone will share screencaps with me.)
- Where I can, I try to embed Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter content within the page, so that you can see and interact with any pictures or videos along with the page text and comments but in a format that makes it clear that it is not my own blog content. You can always click through to view the content directly on Facebook or Twitter.
About the header image
The simple header image on this site — which features Elwood — uses (with permission) a screen capture from a video uploaded on Facebook by Taj with QueEnara & Jet, Set GO. The header also uses the freeware Pussyfoot font by Webdog.
Kitty
[Page last updated: March 31, 2019]
just wanted to say thank you for putting this blog together – it must be a labor of love to put in so much effort – it should be a valuable resource for kitten cam watchers – once again, thank you!
Aw, thanks for the kind words. (And thanks for emailing through YouTube earlier — that’s what prompted me to put the contact notice up and turn on comments on this page.) I’m glad people are finding it useful. 🙂
I Love it, what a great website!
I found this site two days ago (can’t remember how). Where have you been my whole life?! I’ve been following TKHQ since the Wizard of Oz Litter, but my heart is really with the People for Happier Cats rescues. It’s been increasingly difficult to keep up since the whirlwind of Mr. Casserole. Thank you for this labor of love–so happy to make this my homepage to check first thing every morning <3
Hello Kitty,
I really appreciate the summaries you provide, it’s been very helpful in coming up to speed with these (formerly) feral friends and their devoted human rescuers. I started following this comedy/drama series with the “Miracle Kitten” Cassidy this fall, and your page has been invaluable. Thank you very much for all the work you do.
I have some questions about your recap pages that start with: “Note: Page is still being updated.” Currently (for January) the recaps for the following dates are in this condition: 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23. My questions are:
1. At what point should I stop revisiting these pages and just assume there will be no further updates? After 2 days, a week, a month, or should I wait until the “still being updated” notice is removed?
2. When you have updated the recap, is there any way for me to tell what has been updated? Are the updates at the bottom or potentially throughout the page? If it’s throughout the page, are the updates in a different font, text/background colour, or is there some other method to identify them?
Thanks again for your contributions to this community.
Excellent questions and comments. Clearly the way I have been tackling these recaps up to now isn’t quite working out when TinyKittens and LAPS are as busy as they have been. I’m off this week and will get all of those old pages updated and the notices removed. I’m also going to be sorting out a better plan for future recaps. I’ll come back to your comment after that and answer any questions that are still not covered by the updates.
I just want to make it clear that I’m not trying to increase your workload in any way. Don’t let my OCD negatively influence your life 🙂
In fact, if it would help you, I’d be glad to help in some way. Would it be useful for me to track any “Note: Page is still being updated.” and let you know if a post has slipped through the cracks for more than… a week, a month, whatever? Is there anything else I could assist with?
Oh, no. They were excellent and entirely appropriate comments, Maggie. I’d been getting bogged down and sidetracked for awhile and your comment was the incentive I needed to figure something else out, something to lessen my self-imposed workload. (I’ll see your OCD and raise you my own. LOL)
I’ve pretty much decided to stop posting partial recaps and just wait until the next day to post the full thing. That way no one has to keep coming back to check on the completion status of any post and I don’t have to worry about incomplete posts. And really, this blog was never intended to be a “breaking news” live blogging kind of a thing — that’s what the Livestream chats and Facebook/Twitter posts are perfect for. This is meant to be a more permanent archive thing, to pull together the news and posts that otherwise get lost on Facebook and other social media after a few days.
It’s going to take me a couple of weeks to go back through all of the older posts to make sure they’re all complete, but that’s less critical than starting out again as I mean to go on from here. So hopefully, other than the older posts I have to finish, you won’t encounter any more “Page is still being updated” notes. 🙂
Oooh! I really like that concept. It would be both easier for you to manage, and a great resource for those people joining the community who want to know more background information.
People wanting to use the archive will be able to go back and forth in time, and using the tags they can search by topic/space as well. People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff. OMG you’ve created a Kitty-TARDIS!
So, if the archive is to be really useful in the long term, then it needs a great index. I’ve tried to use the tags, but I get inconsistent results: sometimes a topic is mentioned but not tagged; other times a topic is NOT mentioned but IS tagged. Here are some examples from January: Cassidy IS mentioned (untagged): 1, 2, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, and 24; Cassidy is NOT mentioned (tagged): 6 and 7. I don’t know if this is a WordPress issue or what.
That completes my OCD quota for today. Goodnight, and thanks for the fun.
Hi,
I’d just like to thank you so much for doing these blogs and sharing them with everyone else. You have no idea how much I appreciate receiving such accurate and timely information such as the updates you have been writing during the fixations. It’s wonderful to be able to get running commentaries about how many cats have been caught/spayed/neutered and who has needed extra attention and which ones will be kept at TK for further treatment/socialization. Thanks again and keep up the good work.
Goodness!!! I just stumbled on this blog – not even sure how I got here 😉 You know how that is … you start out on one page and follow a link to another and then another and ….. Yeah, you know how that goes, right? Anyway, what an incredible treasure trove of TK data. Thanks for all the past effort and here’s hoping things eventually settle down and return to ‘normal’ over at TKHQ and we all get back to listening to Shelly’s voice giving updates while watching kittens scamper around mismatched socks.
Purrs,
Pat
I just wanted to thank you very much for this very detailed, very thorough blog. I’ve been a TK fan for years, but I gave up on FB and am not into chat, so without your blog I would miss many (most?) of the TK updates and news. Thank you for taking the time to put this blog together, for keeping it updated, and for sharing it.
Stanley just passed, he was the sweetest little thing. I was able to find out about the sudden bad turn and then his passing from here. We all wanted him to be all right and live a wonderful life. It’s so painful to see such a sweet soul pass.
Thank you, Kitty, for keeping everyone updated. I am not good following social media, everything you cover is lucid and succinct. I can’t thank you enough for your time and energy keeping this site going.
RIP Stanley 2019 04 13
http://www.tinykittens.com/cats/533
/Ziggy
Great blog/site. Very detailed information. Thanks so much. I have some names I hope you can add to the master index at your convenience. Eve’s Palindromes: Otto and Izzi (FB page: Izzi & Otto with Dormouse); Arora (FB page: Mama Eve and Arora Palindrome’s Happy Tails); Pip and Siris (FB page: Duchess presents Siris and Pip). They were born on April 27, 2015.
Tip’s Dreamworks kittens: Boots (FB page: The DreamCats where Tip also resides); Skipper and Tigress (FB page: Skipper and Tigress. the Two Dreamers); Eep (FB page: Eep & Owl: Soul Sisters); Hiccup (FB page: Hiccup and Thumper’s Tales about Tails).
Thanks for developing and maintaining this blog. Something I’ve wanted to do for several years, lol.
I can’t believe I forgot Tip’s and Eve’s kittens names from the master list. I’ve added them now. Thanks for letting me know. (They were already all listed on the alumni page.)
Hello. I have some corrections/information.
Nelia’s kittens were also the biggest on day 6. The weights of Nelia’s kittens on April 11th and April 13th have been added to Nelia’s weight chart in the video description of the stream. I don’t think the cat who got hit by a car in April 2018 was Cartwright. Cartwright and Hayes got their status changed to ‘at peace’ in January or February 2018, when Shelly accidentally changed a lot of statuses to at peace. Cartwright and Hayes were the only two whose status stayed at peace.
Great work with this blog as always.
Hiya, I’ve fixed the day 6 heaviest litter. The kittens were not weighed on April 11 and 13 — Shelly just extrapolates missing days when she weighs kittens after a gap. I generally don’t include that extrapolated data unless I haven’t been watching that don’t know that they weren’t from actual weigh-ins. I can’t recall which cats were involved in that January 2018 mix-up. (I had rolled back the page here after Shelly asked, and that revision is no longer available.) I’m going to leave that information the way it is for now.
Why you gotta be so negative about Suri’s kitten’s names?
Seems kind of a weird thing to be concerned/annoyed about.
Because I think they’re foolish names, chosen by chatters for foolish reasons? I’m allowed to have and state my own opinions. I’ve always included my own opinions in past recaps; this isn’t something new, nor is it something that’s likely to stop. Sometimes I have opinions about important things, and sometimes I have opinions about inconsequential things. It doesn’t take away from any factual information I present.
Petty.
GamerGirl,
You lack respect of other people’s boundaries and a sense of discrepancy that goes along with that. You’re projection of your own pettiness onto Kitty is quite apparent. Kitty donates her own time, energy, and money to maintaining a place where others who care almost as much as she does come to keep up on information they find important to them. You’re in Kitty’s house dictating to her which is a clear indication of the sort of person you are. Kitty gets to decide how she will operate in her house, not you.
Nothing you’ve brought up will improve an already well run site. It’s pointless for you to come here and post moot opinions in a place run by a volunteer unless, of course, you’re only here to be disruptive. The ad hominem post you made lucidly indicates you’re just another anonymous internet antagonist who loves spreading misery. I’m sure you’ll be back for more, as your sort always are, but it’s clear you’re a toxic element floating about and won’t stop any time soon as you lot love having the last word believing you’ve won some little war. Thank you for telling us who you are.
Kitty, good luck with your future endeavours and I hope you aren’t discouraged. You’ve done a brilliant job and you have every right to your feelings, how operate this site how you like, and how you choose to invest your time. This project is yours and we here on the net have been lucky to be able to share in this valuable investment of history-in-the-making.
All the best to you.
Sincere regards,
/Ziggy
Thank you for your information.
I am a Japanese who is not good at English. I also write this sentence using Google translate.
I can read a few sentences, but I can hardly hear them, so I am very grateful to this site for organizing what Shelly has said.
Please do not strain yourself. Thank you.
Not sure ripping off content from a non profit organization for your own blog amusement is a very noble endeavor, unless of course you have the full support of that organization?
Not to sound like a broken record and all, but I’m not ripping off content.
I’m sharing publicly-available content using the tools provided by the platforms where that publicly-available content is posted. That’s not ripping off content.
Sharing information provided in that publicly-available content is also not ripping off content.
The entirety of the purpose of this site is to provide information (albeit currently temporarily out-of-date information) for TinyKittens supporters and fans. If TinyKittens provided all of this information in an easily-digested format themselves, I’d be thrilled beyond belief. But all of the social media platforms that TinyKittens uses are designed primarily for current “now” content, not for the ease of access of old or archival information, and Shelly herself would admit that she doesn’t get as much time as she’d like to update the TinyKittens site.
I will admit, though, that I do find all this poorly-placed righteous indignation lately pretty amusing. The site has been here and doing all of this for four years and you’ve all just now noticed it?
You will all be super happy to know that I will be updating the site over the next week. Just in time for the pub fundraiser. Be sure to say hi to me there.
Can’t believe some people. This blog is terrific for TK lovers. I hope the negativity from a few does not deter you from continuing this blog. I come here when I can’t find historical information about TK anywhere else. It is accurate and when an error occurs you are quick to correct it. I applaud you for doing this. It has to be difficult to keep up with all that goes on at TK and assure the accuracy of the information. I think Shelly would approve anyway and may even come here herslf to get information. Thanks for all your effort. Please keep it up. I have followed TK for 4 years, 4 months and 24 days. This helps me remember all the good times (and sometimes sad times). Thanks again
Hi! I just came across your site (it’s Oct. 5, 2019). I’m so happy to see this and I want to tell you that I have been kicking around an idea similar yours for a while now. I love TK and watching the live streams! But after I’ve gotten to know certain cats and some of their history I become curious to find out more. I’ve noticed that TK has videos and posts on at least three different platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram) and nowhere is there a “clearinghouse” site that has links to all of the videos, no matter where, of a given cat.
It seems to me that every bit of information, every pic, and every video for every TK cat is SOMEWHERE on the internet but TK does not have them collated and organized. I think a great deal of thois could be automated. Something like: every time that Shelly (or whoever) uploads a video or post it becomes part of a database that automatically collects and sorts the meta-data and that would allow a semi-automatic listing of each cat and all of the TK media and where to find it.
Anyway, just thought I’d say that you are doing a good thing and I am interested in perhaps figuring out a way to take your idea even further but also automate it so it doesn’t take much ttime to manage the TK clearing house of kitties.
just wondering if you will ever update again?
Your work here is excellent and compelling.
Thanks for all you’ve done!
Grace and her kittens:
Grace & Mercy: Amazing Gracie and Milkbar Mercy
Shermy & Schroeder: The Adventures of Shermy and Schroeder
Clara & Charlotte: Keeping up with Gracies Girls
Frieda and her kittens:
Frieda & Marcie/Marcel (now Una and ?? forgot it): do not have a social media page -> TK Alumni
Marbles (now Tank) & Goose: Tank and Goose
Stella and her Kittens:
Stella & Twinkle (now Eevee): Stella and Eevee
Thomas & Nash: Thomas and Nash
Thor & Nyla (Thorla): Thor and his seeing eye cat Nyla
Mirok: Miraculous Mirok
Haiku: Haiku
Mirage (and Nevada, I think she will be added to that page): TK Mirage – Let the Journey begin
Sahara and her Kittens:
Sahara & Ruby: Momma Sahara and Baby Ruby
Agave & Wadi Ramm: Agave and Wadi Ramm
Mariposa & Chara (now Olive & Gretta, hope I got them right^^): Olive and Gretta
Awesome. I was avoiding starting to update this page because I was so far behind so this is a huge help. (I still have updates to add, but it’s much more “doable” now.)
If you want, I can continue posting the links I aquisition ^^ I really admire the effort you put into this site 🙂 I can not guarantee to do that timely, but from time to time I can make a reply like the one above 🙂
That would be awesome. 🙂
As today waking up is a bit difficult, I update a bit ^^ (I hope I got the thing with the images for FB and Insta right – did not do a lot of html yet^^)
Updates/additional pages:
Leo, Bobbi, Bowie & Big Brother Jager’s link is broken – new link is Leo, Bowie, Ginger & Big Brother Jager
Stella and Eve Instagram (before I only posted FB): stellaeevee
Olive and Gretta Instagram (more updates there): Olive & Gretta
New:
Caramel and Salty: Salty & Caramel, salty_and_caramel
Mavis’ Litter:
Barlow and Oleo: The Amazing Catventures of Barlow & Oleo
Helvetica and Jura: joined Persephone (Pulanders Cat Pack)
Poppins and Zilla: Poppins & Zilla
It’s been a while, but I aquired a few new pages until now^^
Naya’s Kittens:
Della % Myra Facebook: Della & Myra
Widgeon and Ralph Facebook: Widgeon and Ralph
Nymph and Brandywine: babyforestkitties
Billy and her spicy peppers:
Billy (now Chloe) Facebook: Chloe & Toby the Tabbies
Ghost (now Lucy): Facebook: Lucy the Ghost Pepper, Instagram: lucy_g_pepper
Cayenne & Pasilla (now Dammi and Sammi) Facebook: Dammi & Sammi aka The Spicy Peppers
Reposado Facebook: Rooster Po – the Floofy Stegosaurus Kitten
Makenna (now Zoey): joined Horton TK (could not find the link in the list)
Rowyn Faccebook: Rowyn and Friends
Barty: came to a new home, updates on Sable’s page From Hisses to kisses
Quincer(badincerrollypolyman), now Count Cardhu: Facebook Uisge Beatha Clowder, Instagram: uisgebeathaclowder
Sushi’s Rolls:
Sushi and Kobe: Facebook Suhi+Kobe – the best combo, Instagram: sushiandkobe
Nori (now Parmigiana) and Toro (now Reggiano): Facebook: Furry Overlords, Instagram 1: furry.overlords. There might be another Instagram which I don’t know yet (heard something in chat like that)
Harvey and North: Facebook: Harvey, Nyx, and North
Also a few adopters started live streaming (or posting videos on youtube) – should I add them here, too, or would that not fit the scope of this page?
You can absolutely share any information about and links for any adoptors/adoptees. (Sorry it has taken me so long to see and approve your comment.)