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.


Lost at Sea

Book: The Sea's Bitter Harvest

In January 1999, four clam boats were lost in separate incidents in the span of less than three weeks. First, on January 6, the Beth Dee Bob sank in rough weather with all hands. Two days later, the Cape Fear sank under similar circumstances. On January 18, the Adriatic went down with all hands, one day after the Ellie B ran up on the rocks at Manasquan Inlet. In total, 10 lives were lost, sparking a major Coast Guard investigation into safety practices on commercial fishing vessels.