Vanessa Pike Russell

Hi! My name is Vanessa Pike-Russell?. I am a primary school teacher from Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. I am The Crab Street Journal's webmaster and producer.

I have been maintaining a personal hermit crab website since 1995 after the creation of a one page website on my land hermit crab pets. Since that time it has ballooned out into hundreds of files and images. I was soon receiving thousands of emails a month from visitors asking questions about land hermit crab care.

I first came across land hermit crabs when I was five years of age. My Great-Grandfather? wrote a poem about it. When I was in my second year of teacher training I was living in a one bedroom apartment and decided that I wanted a small pet. It was a case of love at first sight. When I entered the pet store I had no idea that I would be taking a land hermit crab home with me. As soon as I picked one of the land hermit crabs up and placed it gently onto my palm I was hooked! The busy antennae tickled my skin, and those cute eyes looked up at me in that adorable way only a hermit crab can.

In December 2000 I used Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 and Adobe Photoshop to draft the first templates for The Crab Street Journal Magazine, creating a Yahoo!Group for the organisation of files and communication between the Magazine contributors. Since then I have upgraded to Dreamweaver MX, and in July 2004 installed a new section to the website which is based on the phpnuke portal software. It has enabled the site to be more dynamic than the previously static version which relied on my coding of each page based on a template. Now, with the technology of MySQL and PHP, the website has taken on a life of its own and I have enjoyed adding new features which enable more interaction and resources for land hermit crab owners.

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