Hello World!

I've been thinking of doing something like this for a long time. It would be much easier to maintain, but it would be a huge task to move 20 years of content over to the new platform.

After a few hours of hacking, I can't believe I got WordPress to largely replicate the look and feel of the old hand-made site. I always thought the old site was beautiful, and I didn't want to convert it to some blocky ugly generic WordPress-looking thing. I can spot a WordPress site a mile away - they all look basically the same - like the designer's finest tool was a shovel.

This doesn't look like WordPress at all. It has all the visual style and pop of the original. And I did it while maintaining the basic flexibility of the WordPress theme I have been developing. I'm giving myself one of these:

The next step will be seeing if I can organize everything in the new structure. The old clickable image maps are going to be the first victim. Those were easy to do twenty years ago with FrontPage, but nowadays there really is no good way to maintain them. GIMP will do it, but it is clumsy and too much work.


ShipBuildingHistory.com is a resource that I have often used to look up many of the reefs and a few of the wrecks in this website. I recently sent in an update, and received a notice that the author had passed away. The next thing that usually happens in these cases is that the website disappears when the hosting goes unpaid, so I immediately grabbed a copy for myself.

That's when I found that the original site was almost a gigabyte in size, and 95% of that was formatting. So I cleaned it up, and cleaned it up, and cleaned it up, and added some navigation structures and other niceties that you would expect. Then I posted my copy as a sub-site here: