Fleet Plan of the Day
- Details
- Brad Williamson
- POD - SSN 680
How many time have you seen an image on the site that you really like and want to add to your own collection? Have you ever thought that you'd like to keep some certain images, just in case, for example, I was to give up my passion for ssn-680.org, and the site would be lost forever. (Like that would ever happen!)
Well, fret no more! We have added a feature to make it easy for you to download your favorite images found around the site outside the Crew Gallery. (The Crew Gallery has its own download links for images posted by your shipmates.)
While there are some exceptions as we move toward the new format for the site, almost every page with images has a gallery accessed by clicking on the thumbnails on the page so you can see large or full-sized high resolution versions of the photos on the page...
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- Details
- Brad Williamson
- POD - SSN 680
The site continues to grow. Your photographs, your sea stories, and anything else you send my way makes it into this museum of living history we call ssn-680.org! We have almost 1000 articles, probably twice that many photographs or more, not counting everything else, and each item of interest that gets added makes it just that much harder to find what you are looking for. To that end, I've been working on indexing the site and though I've barely scratched the surface, there is enough to warrant taking the site index active so you can see how it works and what it does.
The index is located in the right hand column and is called, surprisingly enough, the SSN-680 Site Index. Thought that one up all by myself, I did! Click on the "Select a tag" button and you get a pop-up menu that gives you hundreds of key word choices...
- Details
- Brad Williamson
- POD - SSN 680
One of the more popular features from the old Bates site, the new 1MC has been successfully installed and tested! Sporting a new look and new functionality, this site-wide communication system offers a means to connect in real-time with other shipmates visiting the site. If you are familiar with Facebook's real-time messaging service, you'll feel right at home on the 1MC. If not then you may need a little hands-on training, since it is somewhat more advanced than the old version.
Two components replace the single small pane that used to exist in the right-hand column. Now, you'll find a COMMS tab in the upper left corner, and a user-to-user tab in the lower right corner. These tabs will float with changes in screen size, so if they are obscuring the page you are trying to read, merely resize your browser window larger...
- Details
- Brad Williamson
- POD - SSN 680
My younger brother, eagle-eyed denizen of northwest air traffic control, Kawasaki Concours ninja, and dapper master of the Onassis, True Love, and Eldredge knots for neckties, alerted me to this image on Google Earth this morning. While he described it as an 'itty-bitty' submarine, a quick check of the 'net suggested that it was in fact the NR-1, which, having briefly reflected on the situation actually does qualify as 'itty-bitty'.
Decommissioned back in 2008, defueled in Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, ME, and sent to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (PSNS) to be scrapped, this Google Earth photo taken in March of 2013 is probably the NR-1 in black-face, presumably having exhausted her supply of day-glo orange as a wardrobe fashion statement, for those of you that knew her in her active years.
The Wikipedia article suggests that as of this date the legendary NR-1 is pieces parts...
- Details
- Brad Williamson
- POD - SSN 680
The site commenting system is back in business! One of the many things left to port over from the old site to the new one, the comment system was a complex one that defied easy migration. I finally got up the courage to take it on recently, and am pleased to say that this vital piece of the ssn-680.org website is now installed and functioning. Better yet, none of the 228 comments that had previously been made on the old site were lost. Every comment came through intact, still associated with the correct article and person making the comment, at least as far as I could tell!
So now there is even one more reason to browse the history of the Bates that we have captured on the site. You can comment on any article or photo gallery that you would like, having your comments recorded for posterity...
- Details
- Brad Williamson
- POD - SSN 680
The site continues to evolve in response to your feedback. Several of you had commented on the slideshows at the top of each page and asked if there was an easier way to view the photos and read the captions, and it turns out that after a little work, there is!
A new menu item has been added to the Up Scope! menu, called Showcase. Selecting Showcase opens a list of image Showcases. Each Showcase is a gallery of images found elsewhere on the site - either in the slideshows previously mentioned or just images of special interest or artistic merit that you might find interesting.
The galleries are a preview of the evolution of every photo gallery on the website. Each gallery shows thumbnails of all the gallery images, and so you can scan the whole gallery at a glance. Clicking on any image opens the gallery, which expands the images to fit the size of browser window...
- Details
- Brad Williamson
- POD - SSN 680
It's been a month since I found out about "The Trident Deception" by Rick Campbell, and I finally found time to read it. OK, I've been reading a lot, and I also read "Punk's War" by Ward Carroll, and "Tales of a Cold War Submariner" by Dan Summitt at the same time, so it was more about finding time to sit down and write a brief review despite it having been a couple of weeks since I finished it, but more about those later.
So, in short, regarding "The Trident Deception", I'll jump straight to my recommendation - buy it and read it!
If you need a few more words, it is one the best I've read since Tom Clancy, God rest his soul, penned "The Hunt for Red October" back in the year I got married, one year before I left the USS William H. Bates. It's that good!...
