Day: 20 February 2014
Bad news about the former Stena Antrim (updated)
In particularly sad news for Belfast and Northern Ireland, one of the final passenger vessels built by Harland and Wolff could soon be headed to a beach somewhere for scrapping. The Ibn Batouta (ex Stena Antrim, St Christopher) is one of 4 ferries which have been laid up in Algericas for over 2 years following the failure of owners COMARIT. The port authority is now pushing for them to be declared abandoned so they can be removed and auctioned to the highest bidder. The most likely destination considering the age and condition of the 4 ships is for scrap. Between 1991 and 1996 Stena Antrim served to Stranraer, first from Larne and then from Belfast when Stena moved there in 1995. Of the other veseels (Al Mansour, Banasa, and Boughaz) Al Mansour also served in Irish waters as Stena Nautica for both Sealink and B&I line between Fishguard and Wales. ... Read more
SIte update 20/02/14 #2
Some more updates today as I get the site back up and running again Some further changes under the skin to improve performance. New welcome page to stop all previous posts having to fully load (including all media) before site was displayed. Some new pictures from Scott Mackey added with more to come in the coming days. Thanks also to Scott for a few corrections to the Superfast article. Pages created for cruise calls and operator/route information. Content has still to be added to these pages. Videos re-added to the existing articles. Further pictures to follow in due course once I get permission from the owners. Some further formatting of existing pictures so they display better. Disclaimer added to bottom of page. This is a bit untidy and will be modified to display better in the future. [Now Fixed] Jetpack installed and share buttons added to posts. Facebook like widget ... Read more
Site update 19/02/2014 and 20/02/2014 (and a disaster)
Due to changing of a few settings I managed to break the permalinks feature in WordPress thus corrupting the entire site. No amount of trying to force a reset of the cache in the database or clearing and modifying the htaccess file would get the site back up (the site was totally inaccessible apart from via ftp) so I had to wipe and start afresh! As a result some of the previously implemented features such as ship AIS, cruise ship listings, and some of the videos in the vessel articles have not been re-implemented yet, however the bulk of the site text was backed up on my hard drive and so this has already been restored. The following where my original updates, items striked through have yet to be re-implemented Switched WordPress theme back to responsive as Prana was not displaying very well on mobile devices. This also seems to ... Read more