Beach Talk - World Beach List 2.0

World Beach List started over five years ago in early 2005. Since then it has grown to over 2000 beaches. It was part learning project and part following a pursuit of interest for me. Unfortunately, over the last couple of years my interest waned. This was not because I’m uninterested in beaches now. It was due to the effort required to maintain the site.

This site was originally developed using PHP. Although a very powerful scripting environment, development and testing can be rather cumbersome. This caused me to limit the features included in the site as well as hold off on developing web based administrative functions to help with verifying and approving new content. This resulted in some new submissions sitting in the “pending” queue for over a year.

Things have now changed. Welcome to World Beach List 2.0 based on ASP.NET technology. ASP.NET developed using Microsoft Visual Studio provides a much more robust development environment than I ever had available with PHP. In just a few months worth of evenings I was able to completely rebuild the site. Although much of the look and feel is the same there is no code from the old site. Everything has been rebuilt from the ground up.

With the rebooted site I hope to concentrate more on content with a goal of reaching 3000 beaches by the end of the year. This still won’t keep me from adding some new features. Two of these new features are already online.

The first new feature is a position picker when adding new beaches. In the old site the only way to put in a latitude and longitude was to type it in. You had no way of knowing if the coordinates were correct until the beach was saved and displayed with an embedded map. Now, that map is available while entering in the beach position. Even better, the map marker can be drug around the map to pick the beach position. This makes it possible to mark your beach precisely.

The second new feature is local weather. Thanks to WeatherBug, you can now see the temperate, current condition, and wind speed at a weather station near any beach or town you are looking at. Just click on the weather icon for a detailed forecast for that location.

More features will follow in the future. Suggestions are also welcome. Someone out there is sure to have an idea I’ve never even considered.

Enjoy the sun and sand.

The BeachMaster