Nine months, nine winners. Every one of these is still up on GeoCities.us, and every one is worth your time. I've said a few words about each. Where things have changed on a page since I picked it, I've said that too.

JANUARY 1999
Rescue Greyhounds: Life After the Track
Karen and Phil Dombrowski

My first pick, and it set the bar. Karen and Phil were "small dog people" until they met a cousin's retired racer, and now they've got two seventy-pound greyhounds asleep upside down on the couch. The page tells you how adoption works through their volunteer group, what the first week with a dog who has never seen stairs is like (Phil sat on the third step with a piece of cheese), and what they're really like at home. It's straight about the hard parts too: a greyhound can never be off the leash outside a fence, and they need coats in winter. When I picked it, Comet was running the house alone. Lulu joined him in May.

FEBRUARY 1999
The Ferret Page
Dale and Kim Roth

Bandit, Noodle and Peanut, three ferrets who steal socks, car keys and checkbooks and drag them off to a stash under the bathroom vanity. The page is funny, but what won me over was Kim's ferret-proofing list. "If the head fits, the ferret fits," and then a room-by-room walk-through: recliners, rubber, the gap under the stove, the dryer. That's as good a home safety inspection as any I did on the job. They also tell you to check whether ferrets are even legal where you live before you buy one. Most pet pages never think of it.

MARCH 1999
Mr. Whiskers' Cat Emporium
Donna, in Dayton, Ohio

Where the cats are the boss. Mr. Whiskers is a nine-year-old orange tabby Donna found as a tiny kitten behind the lawn mower in her garage, and he has been running the place ever since, mostly from the top of the TV. Pumpkin the calico talks, Shadow hides from company, and the cat care tips are sound: keep them indoors, spay and neuter, no cow's milk, and keep the people medicine and antifreeze away from them. Since I picked it, Miss Kitty has come home from the county humane society, and Mr. Whiskers has started keeping a diary. And this month GeoCities.us named it Homepage of the Month. Congratulations, Donna. Let the record show the judge got there six months early.

APRIL 1999
Goldfish Done Right
Pete Sandoval

Pete says it in the first paragraph: if your goldfish is in a bowl, it's going to die, and it isn't your fault, because nobody told you. Then he tells you. Twenty gallons for the first fish, a filter rated bigger than the tank, the nitrogen cycle explained so even a firefighter can follow it, and a weekly water change. His comet, Bubba, is nine years old and eight inches long and comes to the front glass when Pete walks into the room. I never knew a goldfish could be somebody's buddy. I do now.

MAY 1999
The PudgeCam
Tina, in Southeast Portland

A camera on a bookshelf, pointed at a window seat, with a new picture every two minutes. The window seat belongs to Pudge, a sixteen-pound orange tabby. Olive, a little tortoiseshell, gets it when Pudge isn't using it, which is never. Tina types doctors' dictation for a living, so she typed up Pudge's vital statistics like a medical chart, and it's the funniest thing in Petsburgh. His vet would like to see about three pounds less of him. The judge, who has been told the same thing, sympathizes.

JUNE 1999
Rabbit Rescue Diaries
Nora Fenwick

Nora has been a foster home for a rabbit rescue since the spring of 1997, and thirty-one rabbits have come through her living room on their way to homes of their own. She cries at every adoption. The page has everything you'd need before you take a rabbit home, and a section titled "Please Read Before Easter" that I wish every pet store would hand out at the register. Rabbits live eight to twelve years. They are not a holiday decoration. Nora says it better than I can, and she says it with four fosters in a pen behind her.

JULY 1999
Sadie, Rusty & Pepper
Andrea Mullins, Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin

Three dogs in thirteen years. Rusty is an eighty-pound golden retriever who still thinks he fits in your lap; Andrea cleans teeth for a living, so she brushes his twice a week, and he thinks it's a treat. Pepper is a scruffy terrier mix from the county humane society who barks at squirrels, the mailman, the garden hose and Rusty, in that order. And Sadie, the black Lab they lost in February of last year, has a page of her own. A family that loves its dogs, and a shelter dog running the house. That's a winner.

AUGUST 1999
Allen's FishCam
Allen Cole, Toledo, Ohio

A 55-gallon tank in a basement den, live, with a new picture every sixty seconds. Allen tells you where to look: the blue and red haze is fifteen neon tetras, the two tall silver fish are the angelfish, Ike and Mamie, the spotted fellows on the gravel are the corydoras, and the brown shape stuck to the glass is Hoover the pleco. Don't miss his Greatest Hits, including the frame where people keep writing to ask if that's a frog. I watched one night for most of an hour. Hoover didn't move. Neither did I.

SEPTEMBER 1999
Walking the Dog, Losing the Weight
Bill Hartman and Charlie

A beagle named Charlie, a man who used to sit on the couch, two walks a day and forty pounds in a year. The full write-up and the judge's notes are on this month's program.

October's pick goes up in the middle of the month. Nominations close October 10. Send yours to [email protected].