Fishpondinfo.com is what happens when a backyard pond diary refuses to stop growing for nearly thirty years.
Robyn Rhudy says her first web page went online in September 1997. The site was reorganized the following year, expanding nine pages into dozens, and then kept multiplying.
By December 2023 she had created her 900th page. In 2026 the homepage described the collection as 943 web pages containing thousands of pages’ worth of information.
The construction method is almost as interesting as the subject matter. Rhudy explains that the pages were originally written as HTML in WordPerfect 6.0 and later in Notepad. There was no elaborate publishing platform hiding behind the archive.
Just pages.
A lot of pages.
The value is in the longitudinal record
Fishpondinfo covers goldfish, koi, frogs, toads, salamanders, turtles, insects, birds, mammals, plants and pond construction, but the best material is often the dated observation log.
One 20-gallon tub pond page begins in 1998 and continues through 2026. It records what animals were added, which ones reproduced, winter survival, pond cleanings, frog eggs, tadpoles and years when expected animals simply did not appear.
The wood frog page becomes a small ecological record. Rhudy notes that in spring 2024, for the first time in roughly twenty years, she heard and saw no wood frogs and found no eggs. In 2025 a small number returned and laid eggs again.
Those entries were not written as formal citizen-science data. That is exactly why they are interesting. A personal website can preserve observations that are too small for a paper but too detailed to fit comfortably into a social-media post.
The site also preserves its own web history. Rhudy moved the project from a UMBC userpages address to Fishpondinfo.com in October 2003 and asked readers to help repair old links. She maintained old versions of the site for comparison and even documented vanished external frog sites, sometimes pointing readers to archived copies after the originals disappeared.
Her animal inventory is similarly blunt. Successes and failures are both included. The homepage explicitly says the goal is to share what worked and what did not so other people can learn from both.
That is an old-Web virtue worth keeping.
Fishpondinfo is not optimized around an expert persona. It is a decades-long record of one person’s attention.
Search engines can index the species names.
The harder thing to preserve is twenty-nine years of noticing when the frogs came back.