Welcome to NJScuba.net, a website dedicated to exploring the New Jersey / New York region underwater -- "Wreck Valley". Here you will find information on dive sites, marine biology, artifacts and activities, gear and training, and many other subjects.
I added navigation structures to the end of every page. If you read all the way to the end of a long page ** you'll find all your navigation options waiting for you at the bottom. So you don't have to scroll all the way back to the top, although you always could do that with just one click.
The structure at the bottom is the most complete navigation 'node' of any; it makes use of all the screen space available in the main area. You can use it to pick your way from one page to the next through entire sections of the website, if you are so inclined.
I have about 3/4 of all the pages/subjects loaded into the new website, with the Dive Sites, Artificial Reefs, and Artifacts sections finished. I've slowed down a lot, but I'll get to the end eventually, and then this site will take over from the old one. This is so much easier to maintain than the old static PHP.
I did some php programming in my custom WordPress theme, and gave it a new ability. Now on each page I can embed related pages, which previously only appeared as links in the sidebar ( and still do. ) While it is possible to embed anywhere, the sensible place is at the end, after all the content. Embedding a page in the middle of another page would probably be confusing. Actually, when a page is embedded, only the beginning of it is displayed, with a link to the whole thing. Then I got an even better idea, and added the page's 'parent' to the list. I also made some formatting changes so that each embedded page is clearly a separate entity.
What is really cool about this for this website is that now every dive site's page now includes the relevant charts. This is something I always had in the back of my mind, but I never thought of an easy way to do it across hundreds of pages, until now. Once the code was finished, it took just a single change in the WordPress setup to make it happen.
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.
After programming some really neat new features, I built the structure for the Marine Biology section. To my surprise, it ended up being larger by page count than the Artificial Reefs section, which I always thought was second after Dive Sites. So far, the total is 925 pages, including these blog posts.
I had a knock-down-drag-out brawl with WordPress over how it should work - the way it wants, or the way I want. I won. The back-end editor is now almost WYSIWYG, and the front end is behaving much better as well.
In addition, between some features I have discovered and some things I am forcing it to do against its will, I think WordPress can now do all the styling and niceties of the old html site.
The site is slowly transforming into a true database - I can slice and dice the entries in many different ways, and the whole thing is also searchable.
I built the tree for the Dive Gear section. All the multi-subject pages have exploded into multiple single-subject pages, and everything then needs to be re-organized. It is very fussy and time-consuming. The worst part was doing the Dive Sites section, because that involved not only organizing things logically, but also geographically. Dive Sites and Artificial Reefs are all tangled up in each other as well, which was fun to sort out. Now up to 1058 pages and posts, with just the Artifacts section left to do.
Later ...
I finished putting in the Artifacts section. The total number of pages now stands at 1163, although I'm sure that will go up as I find things I missed.
I took a look at Dutch Springs on Google Earth, and it is pretty much all gone, as you can see above. All the buildings have been torn down. Sad. The plans to re-open are delayed by construction.
Lake Hydra, formerly Dutch Springs, has re-opened. However, it is strictly for certification classes, and all the land-side facilities are gone. Still, much better than nothing!
I've been hacking up a storm, and I've made some major improvements to the mobile navigation menus, as you can see in the very meta screenshot above. In fact, it's now almost as good on a cellphone as on a big desktop computer. This website has well over a thousand pages, which calls for excellent navigation features if you're ever going to find anything. That's a real problem on a tiny cellphone screen - where do you put it?
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.
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