November 18, 2020
And Here It Is
November 18, 2020
Here is the completely new version of njscuba.net. It is now fully modernized, both the front end and the back end, which is now based on WordPress, with a lot of my own code on top.
The actual cut-over was anti-climactic: I changed a setting in WordPress and then renamed the directories of the old and new sites on the server, and the old domain name suddenly pointed to the new site and that was that. No mucking around in DNS settings and then waiting four hours for something to happen. The old site is now on the new domain name in case I need to get something I missed. It is currently inaccessible.
Everything is different, but still the same. It will take a while for Google to re-index it, probably no more than a week. They have 1152 pages to do. Here is how it breaks down:
| Section | Pages | Size |
| Home | 15 | 0.13 MB |
| Dive Sites | 426 | 1.88 MB |
| Artificial Reefs | 237 | 1.03 MB |
| Biology | 201 | 1.27 MB |
| Artifacts | 70 | 0.93 MB |
| Gear & Training | 129 | 1.01 MB |
| Miscellaneous | ... | ... |
| Total | 1152 | 6.36 MB |
My WordPress theme generates all sorts of interesting numbers like this. The actual database is about 19 MB right now, the numbers above are just the total length of all the text. That doesn't include the window dressing, like all the formatting and links. The entire installation is just over 3 GB. Yes, that's a G for Giga. In the old days, a full CD-ROM was about 700 MB, so that makes 5 CD-ROMs. ( A single-sided DVD-ROM holds about 4.7 GB. )
Compared to before, editing the WordPress site is now absolutely easy, and I have two years to catch up on since the last time I paid any attention to it. I have the WordPress editor tweaked so that it is as close to WYSIWYG as you can get nowadays. I haven't had anything like that since I started the site in FrontPage twenty years ago. How things have changed !!!
Another advantage of WordPress is that I can now easily integrate GoogleEarth, through the use of a plugin I purchased - thank you to my donors! Go to any land-based dive site like Shark River or Dutch Springs, and you can zoom in from above and even pull up StreetView, right in the website. Not much point in doing that for things that are out in the ocean though. I'll be doing more live maps over time. Like this:
Most of the pages are open to comments, so post your dive reports if you want!
Unfortunately, one thing that is gone and not coming back is the clickable charts. Those were my original motivation in starting the site many years ago, but they would be too much work to convert. Probably something like a thousand links, and each one would have to be done by hand. So you'll just have to get used to using the text links below the charts, which WordPress generates automatically. Well, never say never ...
A trade-off is the new search functionality, which is good to start with in WordPress, and I made it much better. Search results are actually the pages themselves, cut short. The same mechanism is used in other ways as well. So if you don't want to poke around and find your broken bookmark, just search it out:
Finally, I now have the only WordPress decompression plugin in the whole world! The old program works exactly the same as it did before. The Gas Calculators also work as before. Last but not least - have a banana!
Next up: fixing all the little things I see and any crud that might have crept in during the transition. I've been pretty careful, and it is pretty clean as it is, despite WordPress' best efforts to inject all kinds of garbage.