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 finished the Artificial Reefs section of the website, probably the second-largest piece after Dive Sites. These two are also the most complicated sections, since they involve geography and spatial relations. Again, no more clickable charts. That would be a huge job, and I would have to get awfully bored to want to tackle it. WordPress is doing a very nice job of handling all the relationships between pages and subjects.
Using WordPress taxonomies, a site no longer needs to 'belong' to a particular chart, it can belong to several at once. That was something that had to be hand-coded before. There's an old programming adage: "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." Look up that quote if you are interested.
WordPress tells me that Artificial Reefs worked out to 235 pages, while Dive Sites is 425.
Finished the Artifacts section, which turned out to be more work than expected. Although the page count is only 69, many of the pages are long and complex, and some of them even have calculators on them. Needless to say, WordPress didn't like any of this, and balked at almost everything. I've been making use of the 'html' block rather than try to do complex things in WordPress' ham-fisted editor.
Finished the Biology section, which ended up being 261 pages. This easily surpasses Artificial Reefs to be the second-largest section after Dive Sites.
Waded into the last section - Dive Gear. Did a lot of long complex pages, and even got the decompression program working by a couple of quick-and-dirty hacks. I think I will make a plugin of it.
I just received my signed copy of this new book, and I must say I am very impressed. It has over 400 pages of information, charts, images, and GPS numbers. This is a must-have for any New Jersey wreck diver.
This website has a link checker, and it just informed me that the OMS link was bad. Sure enough, the website is gone. But it looks like DUI has taken over OMS - the full line of OMS stuff is in the 'OMS' section of DUI's site. So it's probably a good thing, especially in this economic environment. DUI will be around for a long time - they make most if not all of the military's drysuits. Now they have a full line of tech gear; as I recall, I was never too impressed with their own BC designs. Just checked on Dive Rite - they're still there.
Since starting the site, I used charts with white water and gray land, and when I re-built all the charts in OpenLayers, it was easy enough to duplicate that. But I noticed that when you print a page, the gray land disappears. I have never found any documentation on the OpenLayers json map specifications, but I picked-apart some examples and eventually hacked-together a solution where the land is green and it does print. So hooray for that.
All the content from the old site has been loaded into the new one. I didn't leave out anything. After fixing obvious errors, now it is time to start improving.
Six new lines of PHP code allow me to now have two titles for each page. The standard WordPress title is used for all the navigation structures, where it needs to fit in a prescribed space, hence needs to be short. In most cases that is also fine for everything, but sometimes I'd like something more descriptive for page title, headers, etc. Now the short title can be very short, and the long title can be very long - no more need to compromise. This is actually a simple fix for a major shortcoming of WordPress. I am continuing to force it into becoming a real CMS.
I added a slew of new features and capabilities to my standard "Simple" theme, and I think I'm done ( except for the inevitable bug fixes. ). It is still simple to use, but actually pretty sophisticated behind the scenes. The major additions:
Started putting the content in. Figured out how to replicate almost all of the styles of the old site. This is going to take a while - there are over 1100 pages to fill in. Most of them should be quick and easy, I've been tackling the tough ones to start with.
