More Progress

I finished the Dives Sites section of the website, the biggest and most complex part. I also finished the central 'hub' of the site and made some inroads in the Artificial Reefs and Biology sections. I'm also fixing things as I go, like broken weather forecasts.

And none too soon - the old site has become rather balky since I stopped paying attention to it several years ago. For one thing, it will not run on the latest version of PHP. Rather than figure that out, I'll put my efforts into this. It just took five minutes to load a page.

I also added Google Earth integration, which will let you zoom in on land-based sites. Not much point in setting it up at sea though, my 20-year-old wreck charts are still better than anything.

This site is now running on WordPress, with everything stored in a database. That gives a lot of flexibility. I don't really care for WordPress sites, they're usually ugly slabs with no structure. But I've buried WordPress so deep in here that you can't even tell it is there.


clouds

In a coastal area like New Jersey, the dominant winds are created by differential warming of the land and sea by the sun. Air warms over the hotter land and rises, and cool air from over the sea sweeps in underneath to replace it. These on-shore winds build over the course of the day, and so the waves they induce also build over the course of the day, then die down overnight.

I have found that the best diving conditions in New Jersey are either early morning or night. This is when the daily cycle of wave heights is at its lowest. Fortunately, the time restrictions on the inlets and beaches usually coincide with this.