Hacking

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?

It all lives in that little tab at the upper right, which takes up hardly any screen space. The menu itself is now scrollable, and adapts to whatever space is available. It shows all the relevant directions you could go, almost but not quite the same as the desktop sidebar. The mobile navigation is now so good that I decided to leave it turned on all the time.

I don't believe in the "mobile first" paradigm of web design - I think that results in a crummy design that inflates into a bigger crummy design. My method has always been desktop-first, and if it works on smaller devices too, great. It's always worked pretty well on a tablet, but I am just shocked at how well it works now on a phone.

I also did a lot of hacking on the back-end, mainly to keep track of what WordPress is doing behind my back, and stop it. Like deleting images all on its own! That's not helpful.


Tropical Aquaria

Tropical aquaria should generally be maintained at 75-80°F. In hot weather, temperatures up to 85°F are easily tolerated as long as adequate aeration is maintained. The addition of an air stone and a small air pump during these periods is helpful. At 90 F things start to get dangerous, and the tank should be cooled by floating ice packs or blocks of ice in it. Temperatures down to 70°F will generally do little harm, but the fish will be uncomfortable, and the temperature should be raised. Below 65°F is again dangerous for tropical fishes.

Printed from njscuba.net