New Jersey Scuba Diving

In the last few weeks I have re-written pretty much the entire WordPress plugin that generates the charts. In addition, I created a new chart style that is truly marine, with color depth contours and boundaries, in place of the old one that was basically just a stripped-down land map. The result is much more useful, and, I think, quite beautiful, with a lot of transparency effects.

All the charts now have secondary styles, generally road maps or satellite imagery, whatever is most appropriate. The alternate style for this chart is the full undersea rendering. Mine is stripped-down to focus on the shallows and run faster. Be warned: you can bog-down or even hang your computer messing around here!

I think it is interesting how the Hudson River goes into the Mud Hole, which goes into the Hudson canyon, cut into the side of the continental plate. And yet it goes further, cutting another channel down to the abyssal plain. Just how low did the water get during the Ice Age? Or was that something else? The Hudson is not a particularly old river, the Susquehanna is much older, older than the Appalachian Mountains. Yet along the entire Eastern Seaboard, the Hudson has made the deepest cut, comparable to the Grand Canyon.

The chart above has no limits - you can drag it all over the world. Another thing that strikes me is the huge channel between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. The St. Lawrence is a mighty river, but not that mighty - it did not make that, not by itself! North America has clearly seen some tremendous floods. Also, see the chain of volcanic seamounts extending from Cape Cod to the Azores - longer than the Hawaiian Islands. That's not something you might expect to find in the Atlantic!

• 197 Maps on 185 Posts
• 1095 Points
• 19 Lines
• 61 Shapes

Cartography is a very fussy business !!!

Update:

The charts require a good deal of crunching on the server-side, and I always planned to cache them in the database, so each one only needs to be created once, and then reused. Some of the charts have hundreds of points to process. But my initial go at caching caused a lot of problems, so I turned it off. It was not a high priority, I was seeing good enough performance without it. I finally fixed the caching code, and I think I see a noticeable speed-up in the page loads. Or maybe I am imagining it, but in theory it should be faster.

I've also tightened up the back-end code and fixed a lot of problems that crept in as I worked on other things. Finally, I've gotten a lot better at editing json map definitions and making custom map styles like the one above.

Then it all went sideways:

In fixing all those other bugs, I introduced a new one. I think that part of the plugin needs a ground-up re-write, and I am cogitating on that. Then I got a message from MapTiler that I had used-up my free quota for the month. Probably my own fault, I used it up myself while hacking and testing, I should have realized. So I made a new free map style that is very clean and simple, and hardwired everything to use it until I get the mess sorted out.

In the future I will make much less use of the MapTiler service. Switching to even their least paid service level would more than double the maintenance costs of the site, and it is just a hobby. And their depth contours are pretty, but not accurate.

And then it went more sideways:

While I was working on the map stuff, the Bluehost apparently screwed up and took the server down, probably while attempting 'routine maintenance'. I started an online 'chat' with one of their reps, who disappeared for ten minutes, during which time things started working again. (About the time it takes to reboot the machine.)

When he came back, he told me the problem was with my WordPress theme, when I could plainly see in the error logs that the PHP version had briefly reverted to 8.0, which doesn't work anymore. I'm sure that's not the only thing that went wrong, it's the only one I have evidence of to back my suspicions. Tech support will never admit to anything, and always blame you. At least I am smart enough to never follow their disastrous advice!

Anyway, the map plugin is much better now, and in a few days the fancy MapTiler maps will work again. In the future I will make much less use of them to make sure I don't go over my quota. Hopefully, this brings my adventures in cartography to a close, at least for a while.