[Rachel M]

The tool is currently out of date and needs to have many foods added, unfortunately I lost my programmer and need to either find someone else to help me update or learn the skills to do it myself.

[Rachel M]

After hearing from several people looking for foods with specific protein and fat content, I’ve begun adding those to the database as well. We’re also planning to make the results sortable by caloric content or rating soon.

[Rachel M]

I would start by trying a limited ingredient diet, I’m fond of Acana singles pork and apple. I also like Orijen Six Fish as a place to start for digs with allergies. Allergy testing is expensive, I’ve found that an elimination diet was a less expensive and more accurate way to determine what my dog could eat.

Check out DogFoodWizard.com for my food selector tool, you can tell it to exclude foods that contain poultry and any other suspected allergens for your girl and it should give you a whole list of foods she can eat.

[Rachel M]

More updates and everything should be working correctly now. I’ve just started adding some canned, dehydrated, and freeze-dried foods to the database as well.

[Rachel M]

The issue right now is that I haven’t finished putting in the ingredients for the last few foods on the list, so anything that comes up with an empty ingredients box is a food with no entry yet. That should be fixed as soon as I finish entering the ingredients for Wild Calling, Wysong, and Zignature. I also need to remove the foods that have been discontinued over the months I have been working on this project. Hopefully we’ll get those last few entries done and update the data soon.

[Rachel M]

Do those unhelpful results have anything listed in the ingredients window?

[Rachel M]

Should be fixed now Dori, let me know if you still get unhelpful results.

[Rachel M]

Right now it looks like any food that doesn’t have a master ingredients list entered (either because the food has been discontinued or because I just have gotten there yet, especially at the end of the alphabet) will show up in any search result. I will try to get that fixed and the rest if the w-z brands entered today, for now just disregard anything that comes up with no listed ingredients.

[Rachel M]

We’re back up and running! There are definitely still some things to adjust, but the major issues with the code have been solved and almost all of the data has been entered. You should now be able to successfully filter out ingrdeints like tomato, tapioca, flaxseed, and many others.

[Rachel M]

Glad you enjoyed the blog! I certainly have fun writing it.

Dog Food Wizard 2.0has not taken effect yet. I started adding new allergens and then we decided to revamp the entire thing. It will probably be a week or two before we have the new program up and running, and I can’t make any smaller revisions to the database before then.

[Rachel M]

Thanks for pointing that one out! That particular error is caused by an omission in the database. I’m about 25% done redoing the database, after which we will be trying to make the program smarter rather than doing everything on the database end. This should make it easier to flag new allergens and generally be less time-intensive, it also should cut down on bugs like that one.

[Rachel M]

Thank you for the suggestion, garlic will definitely be going on the list. We’re fiddling with the system to make it a lot easier for me to add and update foods, hopefully we’ll have the revision done in a week or so.

[Rachel M]

Thank you for spotting that bug! We’re figuring out how to fix it and adding some new allergens and redoing the simple search.

We’re hoping to add canned/raw/dehydrated foods as well as more brands of food. Common pet store foods and the remaining foods from the existing brands are probably the next step, but I can also prioritize adding certain brands by request

[Rachel M]

Flax and tomato are being added in the next revision. Does you avoid foods with tomato pomace?

[Rachel M]

Lentils, potatoes, and chickpeas can be found under the advanced tab. I had originally only included the major carbohydrate sources for each food, but after hearing how many dogs can’t have potatoes and sweet potatoes, I am revising the database to include all of them.

[Rachel M]

Today we switched the check box system around, so now all boxes start out unchecked. Check the foods your dog cannot eat and then hit ‘go’. Reset will uncheck everything, hit ‘go’ to see the results.

[Rachel M]

Theoretically, you will uncheck the ingredients you don’t want and then hit ‘go’ and see a list of foods without those ingredients. It helps to leave as many checked as possible, if there are no foods that contain all of the specific ingredients you left checked, you won’t get any results. (i.e. there are no foods that use kangaroo as the only protein and tapioca as the only carbohydrate)

My husband and his friend are doing all of the coding for me, it’s a whale of a project and we’re all sort of learning as we go. If something doesn’t seem to be working, let me know and we’ll try to fix it.

[Rachel M]

I will be adding flax and tomato as allergy alerts, right now you can exclude potato, sweet potato, and fish oil via advanced mode.

[Rachel M]

Thanks for helping find that bug! Trying to fix it right now. So far I have only included brands that have at least one grain-free kibble, and only kibble, since it seemed like a good place to start. I will add tomato and flax seeds in a future update, gotta find out what else is a potential allergen and then check 800 food labels.

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