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Notes on Fredcat's famous Diary!

If you, Dear Reader, could see how Fredcat's Diary was created, you'll realise that it has been a long term project and it ended up “growing like Topsy”!

Started in June 2003, Fredcat's first dictations were not of a high quality (!) and this was totally down to his humans trying to understand the complexities of this new way of writing what eventually evolved into a “blog” (horrible word). We think his later Diary entries were of a better quality.

It took time to for Cathie (and Mr. B.) to get to grips with basic coding techniques, adding pictures, captions, floating captions, links to other interesting sites, videos of Fredcat, and so forth. This was quite apart from the need to understand the hosting and uploading techniques to put the Diary on the internet. Mr. B. was originally taught the basic coding techniques but well before the end Cathie had mastered these by accretion.

There were many scares along the way: sometimes the Fredcat computer did not work as it should have done; sometimes the hosting or file transfer uploading systems did not work - and frequently we never knew the reason why this was happening. When computers were changed there was always the worry that important data would be lost, but that never happened.

On at least two occasions Mr. B. accidentally overwrote a previous Fredcat Diary entry and a recovery arrangement had to be done.

On at least three occasions one or other of Fredcat's humans had to go to England for at least a week, sometimes longer, which meant that methods had to worked out to find ways to ensure that Fredcat's famous Diary continued to appear on schedule.

Counting how many visitors read Fredcat's Diary was almost like sticking one's paw into the air (!) Anyone who has ever had any experience of this will realize that measurement entirely depends on what, how and who carries out these measurements (“lies, damn lies and statistics!”). Nonetheless any statistics that were presented to his readers in his Diary were as accurate as our external measurers could devise.

We should point out that Fredcat was indeed a “Page Millionaire”, which means that his Diary pages were read over a million times by readers.

The Fredcat Tails were totally fictional stories invented as a sideshow to give those readers who sent in their cat's photos to Fredcat an opportunity for their cats to participate in the Fredcat Diaries and Tails. The decision to make any single cat in a Tail a villain or a hero was entirely random. The main point of the Tails was an attempt by Fredcat to gain additional food from Mr. B. by inventing an implausible story.

Events shaped the Diaries. Over 99% of the Diaries were based on true events either in the Fredcat household or elsewhere in the world. Some of the Tails were based on actual events - but we're not telling you which ones!

Fredcat himself, was provided with certain human characteristics. We know of the following - can you think of any more?

• pure ego;
• self-interested greed (occasionally);
• an enquiring nature about certain facts of life;
• being permanently five years of age (a little delving into his famous Diaries will reveal his true age);
• a wry and difficult persona (to give the Diary a little bite);
• incredible intelligence (obtaining higher degrees at will);
• an inability to count beyond nine (to mimic the so-called nine lives of a cat).

In short he was given an “attitude”.

Fredcat was a true immigrant rescue cat and he made the journey from England to Raleigh, North Carolina, with aplomb. He truly hated riding in cars and, although he utterly disliked going to the vet, he was usually very well behaved when he got there. He lived a lonely life when he arrived in the US and although he was an indoor/outdoor cat, able to come and go at will, he never saw another cat during the last seven years of his life.

He did have a mentor cat, called Forby, when he lived in England.

The “Cathie” in the Diaries is drawn heavily upon Cathie's true life personality which has been quite accurately described in the diaries; which means she effectively gave unconditional love for Fredcat throughout. The diaries are essentially the description of the relationship between a cat, Fredcat, and his best human friend, Cathie, and the introduction of the more nebulous “Mr. B.” was mainly to add a little tension between two males - ready for resolution by Cathie.

We have always replied to all those who emailed Fredcat although we decided not to make his Guestbook an interactive one, to avoid tension between readers with conflicting views! This had the unfortunate result that individual readers were never able to get in touch with one another to share experiences.

We decided to make Fredcat's Diaries free from commercial interests - it contained no advertising. That meant that all expenses associated with creating and maintaining Fredcat's Diaries were borne by his humans. Even Fredcat's bumper stickers were provided and mailed free of charge to those who asked for them (apart from a spate of freeloaders who jumped on a bandwagon at one stage). To be truthful we didn't readily see a way to exploit the website commercially and become millionaires ourselves - and we still don't! If you want to make suggestions in this regard, they would be most welcome.

The local newspaper did interview us and an attractive spread about Fredcat appeared, but Cathie modestly decided that it would be best to turn aside a request from a local TV station to gain greater coverage. In point of fact, knowing Fredcat, he probably wouldn't have been co-operative in front of the TV cameras.

All the humans referred to in the text of the diaries are real people, although some of them were given non-de-plumes. We always asked them in advance if they were willing to have their name posted in the Diaries and all agreed without hesitation.

It was decided, as a policy, that we would attempt to steer clear of controversy wherever possible and not involve Fredcat in issues of the day. These might be mentioned in passing but no opinion on them would be expressed.

For those of you who want to know these things, it should be pointed out that once the idea of having a website had been suggested, with Fredcat the Famous as its star, Cathie became the driving force behind it all. It was she who drove the project forward, came up with ideas for expanding Fredcat's Diary from the simple website it was in its early days and made sure that its momentum continued to become the popular website it is today.

Cathie took the vast majority of Fredcat's photographs and made them ready for the Diary, and she arranged the final montage and Google web album which are part of Fredcat's last Diary entry. It was she who came up with the idea of Fredcat bumper stickers and did everything from their design and purchase through to making sure that they were mailed off to recipients around the world. Yes - around the world!

Cathie was the final arbiter on the Diary's colour schemes, how the images therein were to be displayed, what links were to be included (entailing much research), how the pages should finally look and, most importantly, she was the final editor and proof-reader before the Diary was uploaded to the internet - all this whilst maintaining a normal day time job! To her must go all the plaudits.

It was Mr. B.'s job, following discussions with Cathie, to draft a Diary entry and read the finished daily Diary to her the evening before it was placed on the internet, to ensure that the Diary entry sounded good when read aloud (we know that some of Fredcat's readers read his Diary entries to children), and to do the actual uploading the next morning.

We have had a lot of fun along the way. Thanks to all who contributed to the website.

Farewell from Mr. B. (edited, as always, by Cathie)

Fredcat was a good boy and will be sadly missed. Farewell from his best human friend, Cathie