The ShipWatcher Blog

I’ve created a news channel blog exclusively for news about cruising.

To go there, just click on the “News” link in the links section on the right hand side of the page, or go to http://ShipWatcherNews.Blogspot.com.

It shows all the latest news reports, videos and gossip about cruising, and comes with its own built-in search engine from Google.

Please try it out and let me know what yout think.

The whole idea is to give you a place where it’s easy to keep upto date with cruising.

It also has its own RSS feed if you’d like to get an immediate notification of any breaking news.

Sometimes when you view the ShipWatcher page, some of the ships are in darkness.

A while ago, we fixed this by adding a “Quick Pick” facility which quickly selected a few ships close to sunrise or sunset. That way you could easily get rid of the ships in the night, and see something more interesting.

But then, if you came back again a few hours later, some of those ships would be in in darkness, and you’d have to click on “Quick Pick” again to get some new ships.

So I’ve added a new feature: When you click on “Quick Pick” now, you get asked if you’d like ShipWatcher to automatically do a quick pick every time you visit the site. This is handy because it means you ALWAYS get to see ships that are in daylight.

Please try it out and let me know if you find it helpful – I’m always looking for ways to make ShipWatcher better, and I appreciate any advice!

If you want all the latest news about cruising, check out our latest “ShipWatcher News” (http://ShipWatcher.com/News.aspx) section which gives you the most recent news from all over the world about recent happenings in the cruise industry.

I fixed a bug which was causing problems when you tried to display Costa Ships Allegra, Concordia and Europa.

The bug prevented the webcams from being displayed for those ships.

It all works ok now.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

I’ve added some new features:

1. Click on the “Quick Pick” button to quickly pick a few ships that are worth looking at. The system will choose ships close to either a sunrise or sunset. If there’s any space left over, it will add in some ships that are in the middle of the day. This makes it easier for you to avoid picking ships that are in the dark – you can’t see much at night!

2. Click on the “Hide Video” / “Show Video” button to toggle the display of videos at the bottom of the page. I’ve added a few timeplapse videos of ShipWatcher webcams down here. The selection changes depending on which ships you choose. If you don’t like seeing the videos, just click on the “Hide video” button. ShipWatcher will remember your preference for next time.

If you’ve got any complaints or advice about these latest changes, please let me know. My main priority is to make it an enjoyable experience for everyone.

I’ve added the webcam for Cunard’s latest ship, Queen Victoria.

If you can’t see it on the main page, just click on the [Preferences] button, select “Queen Victoria” from the “Cunard” section, and press SAVE.

I don’t have her callsign at the moment. If anyone knows this, please let me know, because I can use this to get a location for the ship, give you tracking info, and take more meaningful photos.

Till then, please feel free to click away on the camera icon under QV so we can get some pictures of her.

I’ve changed the way maps are displayed in ShipWatcher, to get around the recent problems that have been occurring with the Google Maps web site.

Rather than going to the Google Maps website, it now pops up a smaller window which shows the map.

If you’ve got any suggestions about how to make it better, please let me know.

You may experience difficulties when trying to display the position of a ship in Google Maps.

This is a known problem that the folks at Google Maps are aware of. I’m hoping they will fix it asap.

Here’s the link if you’re interested:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-Troubleshooting/browse_thread/thread/f5a56d911022812e

Pacific Dawn does not broadcast its position like most of the other ships, so it’s difficult to figure out where it is.

But P&O does publish its last and next ports.

I’ve built in some intelligence into the system so that it will look at other ships who have travelled the same route, and work out an estimated location for Pacific Dawn.

It’s only a rough guess, but I think it should be accurate to within about 100km.

Which means ShipWatcher should be able to take automatic photos of the Pacific Dawn webcam.