New Jersey Scuba Diving

I've been chugging away here.

The two Delaware reefs are now fully up to date, with the graphics re-sized for the new layout. I also built the structure for the New York reefs, after finding where New York is hiding all the data. And I do mean hiding, you'd be lucky to ever find it, I ran across it completely by accident. They have put it up in a way that is completely impenetrable to Google - you could search forever and never find it. Next up will be filling in all the missing New York reefs.

Speaking of Google, I've been disappointed with the number of hits from Googlebot. They don't seem to be doing their job - no wonder it takes so long to re-index a site! Then I added some code to start tracking misses as well as hits, and I soon discovered that I get several hundred misses a day from Google. They're still looking for the old site, after over a month. Idiots. I made a few changes to hopefully help them along.

Then I got distracted and did something really neat with WordPress categories. They are now much better integrated with the rest of the site, and they're much prettier too! Basically, I defined a 'parent' page for each category. The parent page is the main link to the category, but it also serves as the category header, and lends its navigation menus to the category. This gives each category its own place in the 'tree' rather than just using the default home. For example my tugboats category:

Tugboats

Categories now also have full stats tracking, so I can see if I just wasted my time. All of this is integrated in the back-end as well. WordPress is becoming more and more capable. I like to change gears between doing graphics and artistic design, writing copy, and writing code, which is a different kind of artistic. ( I guess you could file this all under 'stupid database tricks', but whatever. I had the idea for a while, and I wanted to see if I could do it. )

I also made all the reef charts clickable again. I said I wasn't going to do that, but I found a way that is simple and robust, WordPress won't just eat it. In fact, it is easier and more robust than the old way. I'm getting better and better with GIMP, it actually does the charts much better than the old Image Composer, once you get used to the bag of broken glass that passes for a user interface.

These are all the tools I'm using to do the site:

• https://www.irfanview.com - image viewing / lightweight editing
• https://www.gimp.org - image editing & image maps
• https://www.editpadlite.com - text editor
• https://wordpress.com - publishing
• https://www.php.net - programming
• https://www.google.com/chrome - main web browser
• https://filezilla-project.org - file transfer
• https://www.libreoffice.org - spreadsheet, etc

I put away the Mac a couple of years ago and went back to a Dell laptop. Windows 10 actually works pretty well - reasonably stable and secure. The new Macs are pretty junky too - I'm not paying $2000 for something that was put together with hot glue!

Finally, thank you to my donors! Web hosting and other software is not free!