Topic: Diver's Lounge / Invasive species brings diversity???????

As an addendum to previous link, here is the link to the NY Times article I referenced.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/science/09inva.html?ei=5070&emc=eta1

Topic: Diver's Lounge / Invasive species brings diversity???????

Did anyone read the NY Times Science section today. The headline article was titled “Friendly Invaders”. It was written by Carl Zimmer. It was a discusion about invasive species and the possible diversity it brings. Mostly what I’ve read lately about this subject includes the effects of Lionfish in the keys and the caribbean. I wonder what the mood is among divers about this new or different perspective.

Topic: Diver's Lounge / When's a Good Time to Dive in The Bahamas?

I love diving the Bahamas in the summer, especially early August. Oh it’s warm inland but on the beach or on a boat there’s a cool breeze. The water is so clear, I remember a dive near Conception Island. I swam down to get close to a shark I thought was at about 80 feet, but when I got there he was still 80 feet below me.

Topic: How do you use MyNextDive? / How do I find a dive site location?

Hi Lucy,

Unfortunately, we been focusing primarily on the Caribbean region, and haven’t looked at the Australia region much at all. I’ll see if we can populate that region with some information as soon as possible.

—Calvin

Topic: How do you use MyNextDive? / How do I find a dive site location?

I want to search for Airlie Beach in Queensland, Australia. I am confident I can get the east coast of Australia but I need to see towns on the map to be able to narrow it down. Can’t see how to use the Google maps search function to find it.

Topic: Diver's Lounge / Say Hi!

Hi Everyone
My name is Pete. I was thinking about returning to a great dive site in the Bahamas and stumbled on your site. I believe Theo’s wreck is the site I loved a few years ago. Anyone know of a great operator that visit’s Theo’s wreck?

Topic: Announcements / Forum/App Changes

As of today, we no longer have the Sandbox and Alpha Tester forums. We felt that MyNextDive have progressed far enough to where those forums have outlived their usefulness.

Neil and I have being making a lot of changes to MyNextDive—I recommend checking out my the Dive Journal on my profile page:

http://www.mynextdive.com/profile/show/8-calvin

As we get closer to our official beta, we’ll start posting regularly in this forum of any updates to the website.

—Calvin

Topic: Diver's Lounge / When's a Good Time to Dive in The Bahamas?

The simple answer is, anytime is a good time, but it depends on how clear you want the water to be, how prone you are to sea sickness, and what your idea of “cold” is.

In the winter, you’ll need a wet suit to be comfortable, as the seas cool down. In the summers, the water’s so warm you can dive in a swim suit and be just fine. Winter also bring storms, which make large slow rolling waves which are a recipie for sea sickness. The hurricane season brings, well, hurricanes, but the chances of one hitting Nassau (the capitcal) are very slim. Any heaver weather that moves the sea a lot is going to kick up sand and silt from the sea floor and drop visibility, which can drop visibility from 100 feet to 20 feet.

My advice would be the best time to dive is late spring to early summer…but then you’re with all the other people wanting to catch the good weather. Still, provide you can get a hotel, if you’re certified the boat won’t be that crowded if you go on the certified-only trips.

Hope that helps, Neil

Topic: Diver's Lounge / When's a Good Time to Dive in The Bahamas?

Hi everybody!

I’m looking to plan a trip to The Bahamas and want to make sure the weather’s nice and that the sites aren’t too crowded.

Topic: How do you use MyNextDive? / How does 'Watch Topic' work?

Hi XMan,

Currently, all Watch Topics does is put the topic in your own personal RSS Feed, which you can read from an RSS Reader. You can get your personal feed from your profile page, under Monitored Posts. You can get to your profile page by clicking on your user id in the header, or by clicking on your name next to your avatar on any of your posts. Here’s your profile page, XMan: http://www.mynextdive.com/profile/show/47-xman

Here’s some more information about RSS: http://www.whatisrss.com/

If you don’t currently use an RSS Reader, I’d recommend checking out Google Reader, which is what I use. I understand that this isn’t ideal for some, and that many of you would prefer to get emails instead, and we’re currently working on a solution for that as well.

—Calvin

Topic: How do you use MyNextDive? / How does 'Watch Topic' work?

I have it checked on some of the topics, but I’m not getting any updates.

Topic: Diver's Lounge / Say Hi!

Welcome to MyNextDive!

My name is Neil, and my buddy Calvin and I created MyNextDive. I live in the US now, but I grew up in the Bahamas where my Dad owns and operates Bahama Divers . All through my summers in college I worked on dive boats and eventually got my PADI Rescue Diver certification.

I’m really excited about getting this site up. Calvin and I are both software engineers specializing in large scale web applications, so when it came time to build our own, I went with what I knew best (outside of information technology) – diving! I brought the idea of a “Scuba Diving Website” (it was a very vague idea in the beginning) to Calvin at the end of 2006, and working together we came up with the worlds first dive travel planning web application.

Hope you enjoy yourself at MyNextDive – if not post what we need to do to fix it. We can’t promise we’ll be able to fulfill all requests, but we sure will try!

—Neil

Topic: Diver's Lounge / Say Hi!

New to MyNextDive? Introduce yourself here!

My name is Calvin and me along with Neil created MyNextDive because we felt that there currently isn’t an adequate outlet on the Internet for Scuba divers to get to know each other, and we wanted to change that.

I’ll admit, I’m not a diver, and never thought about scuba diving as a hobby until my buddy Neil spoke to me about it. And when he came to me asking for help with this idea about a Scuba website, I knew I wanted to help. I’m excited at the opportunity to meeting all of you, and before the all is said and done I promise you that you’ll be seeing me in a scuba outfit (which means I should be hitting the gym yesterday). And you’ll be able to read all about my experiences in on MyNextDive.

Again, welcome to MyNextDive!

—Calvin

Topic: Feature Requests / Not a member?

Where are you seeing this problem (what pages)? We should be reading the cookie, that is if you have the remember me option checked.

—Calvin

Topic: Announcements / We went Alpha!

Who says the optimization was premature? ;)

Thanks for checking out the site. As always, any feedback is welcomed.

—Calvin

Topic: Feature Requests / Not a member?

What do you mean not a member? Of course I’m a member. Can’t you see the cookie on my machine? Not that I’m saying I want you to log me in automatically (especially not if I just logged out). Just read the cookie, and change the not a member text. And if there is more than one account on the machine (for the current user), don’t just override the persistent cookie with one users info.

Topic: Feature Requests / Register Faster

email address password

(password just once once! – if it’s wrong they won’t be able to login after clicking on the activate code in the confirmation_email. but you’ll know it’s them since they have the confirmation code, so just reset the password on the fly if they botched it). They can pick a new username/displayname/nickname/realname/avatar/favoritesongs on there account page later.

Topic: Announcements / We went Alpha!

The magic rule of thumb! never have i thought you would have succumb to the superior sense of accomplishment (others recognizing your accomplishment instead of just you) of just putting it out there. Also, I think Calvin pulled a fast one on you. You do know XP’s position on premature optimization? Anyway, great job. I’ll continue poking around now (months later).

Topic: Announcements / About the Recent Downtime

The Data Center our Hosting Service is with were having some serious network issues. The extended length of downtime has us very concerned, and we’re going to keep on top of it and make any changes necessary to ensure the reliability of MND.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

—Calvin

Topic: Bug Reports / Site is slow

Here’s what we’ve done so far on the performance front (since initial alpha release):

1. We’ve put in a little effort in optimizing queries—still more to be done from that angle.
2. We’ve started implementing some caching, which is helping out tremendously on performance.
3. We’ve recently compressed all our javascripts and stylesheets into one file.
4. We’re now on a hosting service which gives us more flexibility in performance optimization.

Of course, this is a continuous work in progress, making this service as fast as possible is a top priority.

—Calvin

Topic: Bug Reports / Profile updates not working

tanakar, You should be able to update your profile now, thanks for pointing it out.

—Calvin

Topic: Bug Reports / Visible area of page

Another (very minor) thing related to available space and display – when you have a very long string of content in the map information bubble, the bubble does not expand to fit the content area (example – Lost Blue Hole). About a year ago I know I had this same issue – not sure if a workaround has been developed yet or not. I had an idea for a lame hack to fix it, but I don’t know if you want something like that mucking up good code.

Pretty sure you knew, but I needed a postCount++.

Topic: Announcements / Moving Servers

We’re unhappy with MediaTemple, so we’re moving to Rails Machine.

—Neil

Topic: Feature Requests / Trip Iteration Coming

Calvin and I just decided that the next feature we need to add is the trip list iteration. We actually have a full list of requirements (complete with screenshots) but we’re not posting it on the forums as it represents quite a bit of (patentable) intellectual property. What’s there not is pretty lame compared to what it’s going to look like in a few weeks.

Behind the sceens, we’re fixing bugs and performance tuning the app. We do the majority of our work over the weekend, so bear with us until we have a chance to get everything fixed, upgraded and deployed.

Thanks for your patience,

—Neil

Topic: Bug Reports / Form fields showing up on "save" at the top of the page

This should be fixed with tonights deployment.

—Neil