Scuba Geek

WikiScuba enhancements make it even easier to use and more useful to scuba divers April 10, 2006

Posted by Andy Carroll in : News, Trivia , trackback

Its been a little while since WikiScuba was created with the aim of becoming the scuba diving encyclopedia all divers could call upon as a research aid, and there have been a few recent improvements which I thought were worth telling people about.

There is now a clever little bookmarklet available, the link to which is on the home page of the site. By right clicking and saving as a bookmark or saving to favourites you are now able to search wikiscuba without going through the trouble of actually visiting the site. Once the bookmark is in place you can click on it and a search box appears into which you can type a search term and the wikiscuba site pops up with the relevant search page. Even cooler is that you can highlight any text on a webpage and then click the bookmark and the wikiscuba site pops up on the search page again! This should prove very useful and convenient for finding information about a certain topic you see on another site.

Another improvement is on my blog here. I use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin and with a little tweaking I have been able to create wikiscuba ‘tags’. Basically by clicking on the little wikiscuba icons at the end of this article the wikiscuba site pops up with the relevant page (if there is one). If you would like to do the same just let me know and I’ll provide the code for you. Of course, if you have a site on the deep stop then you can use the plugin straight away!

And finally, wikiscuba has been equipped with full rdf functionality, and articles can now be given attributes. The best way to demonstrate this is simply to visit this rudimentary article on the Salsette, a wreck in the English Channel. Within WikiScuba the Salsette can be marked as a wreck, with the depth, location etc. and linked to things like Google Maps or allow a visitor to search for all wrecks in the english channel for example.

All we need now is more wikidivers to help build the wiki into a better resource. Go on, give it a try.