This website will remain advert and subscription free. Donations will be greatly appreciated since all programming,server hosting and support is all volunteered.
HELP - BASICS
This Website
This website is all about the maps and the dots. The principle requirement was to create a facility for Lagoon Catamaran owners to see who is close by to suggest a meet up and some socialising.
There are actually FIVE Maps:
1. Map of Members showing the last known location of each member (colour coded to represent the model of Catamaran) so that you can see where everyone is, or perhaps more accurately where they were when they last recorded their position.
2. Each member has a My Locations Map so that they can have friends and family viewing their progress and other members can see where we have all been or where we are going if dates in the future are used.
3. A new addition was the Map of Marinas, which is designed to assist us in quickly checking whether a marina is Catamaran Friendly. A red mark on a marina may quickly guide you to a more appropriate marina close by. This was larger extended with adding a Map of Anchorages.
4. For members without AIS, the AIS Map is designed provide some information of vessels in your vicinity with AIS transducers. Currently, not all vessels have AIS or the facility to update the marinetraffic.com database and map. However it is a facility that could be helpful at some stage and will become more helpful as AIS becomes more prevalent.
5. Embedded within the marina map is an automated link to the ActiveCaptain website, which is a very comprehensive and extensive database of marinas around the world. As we only have and initial need to know whether the marina accepts catamarans, the Map of Marinas only shows this. Any additional data should be sought from the ActiveCaptain database and you are encouraged to update information on that site.
Updating the website
The important factor was making a complicated and sophisticated website...
...very easy to use.
Manual Updating is very quick and easy to do if you are short of time.You only need to click on the + Add New button in your My Location List. This website then automatically adds your new location and even attempts to GEO-LOCATE your latitude and longitude from your position.
If it is unable to do this, all you need to do is enter your latitude and longitude in decimal DD.DDDD, degrees and minutes DD MM.MMM or even in the old fashioned degrees, minutes and seconds DD MM SS.
If you do not have your position's latitude and longitude, then use the + Add New via map button in your My Location List. This will enable you to pinpoint the location precisely.
When you have a little more time, then you can check the accuracy of the location from your logbook or GPS and even write some blogs or notes for yourself.
AutomaticUpdating is even easier if you have a modern mobile phone with data, as application does it all for you.
The free instamapper application will record your locations as often as you want (whenever you run th eprogram) and when you are in mobile phone range (or wifi) then it will update the website with your accurate latitude and longitude automatically. Adding blogs and notes will still need to be writeen yourself, although It cannot be too long before our phones are blogging for us.
