About The Cephalopod Page
The Cephalopod Page (TCP) first appeared in the summer of 1995. At that time there were less than 25,000 web sites on the Internet and I (Dr. James B. Wood) knew almost nothing about the web. I thought that the easiest way to learn more was to create my own web page but wanted to make something a bit different than the typical 'this is me, this is a picture of my dog, this the the music I listen to' web pages that were common at the time. Thus, The Cephalopod Page was born. Initially, I worked on the page during lunch breaks.  It started out very small but grew to the out of control beast you see today with time. Originally, I provided all of the content. As the page grew, I was very happy to have many scientists, divers, photographers and nature lovers contributing articles, images, ideas and corrections. The site has greatly benefited from this additional content and my roll with TCP has evolved into more of an editor than primary author.
The goal of TCP has not changed over time. I strive to provide an accurate, interesting and educational content oriented page devoted to the most active, intelligent and interesting invertebrates known—the Cephalopods.
TCP is something I do in my 'spare' time. I receive no external funding for the time I spend updating it, correcting my numerous spelling  mistakes and answering the tons of email it generates. All questions I receive are answered and I often point people toward useful resources when I don't know an answer off the top of my head.
TCP is aimed at the general public; from kindergarten to Ph.D. and all levels in between. In 1998, with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation I started a second and much more ambitious web project CephBase. CephBase is a relational database driven interactive web site and as such, it was significantly more challenging to code. The purpose of CephBase was to provide life history, distribution, catch and taxonomic data on all living species of cephalopods. CephBase includes a list of all species of cephalopods, the international directory of cephalopod workers, cephalopod predators, cephalopod prey and location data for a variety of species of cephalopods.
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