Ben Ruset Sysadmin, etc.

Site Redesign Done, and some Exploring!

This weekend I finished up on my migration to vbDrupal. The site is about 90% of where I want it to be. I'm happy to have it off of WordPress. Not that I have a problem with WordPress - in fact, I love it - but the amount of automated attacks and attempted spam comments was mind boggling. Akismet did it's job and kept the spammers at bay, but it was still a pain to get a ton of emails every day about the comments.

What's left to do? I'd like to get Geotagging support added to my posts. I also need to figure out how I can leverage the book module for the site. There's a lot of really cool things that I can do with Drupal to make the site an even better resource. Plus, the fact that it integrates seamlessly with vBulletin is pretty cool too. The only drawback is that Google will have to reindex the site from scratch - all of my old URL's are dead. Still, the SEO of Drupal is really good - I imagine it won't be too big of a hit to take. Even then, I'm not designing the site for Google's crawler, I'm designing it for people who are interested in the Pine Barrens. They'll find me.

Since I didn't want to spend my entire Thanksgiving holiday behind my laptop, I did a bit of light exploring. A user on my forums posted a question about a supposed former campground near Deep Hollow. There's a paved road that makes a ring around Deep Hollow Lake. Bob chimed in that there had in fact been a campground there, with individual campsites lining the road, but the State had abandoned it sometime in the 1970's. Since it wasn't too far, and was close to another place I wanted to explore - Lower Mill - I drove out there.

Deep Hollow is located in one of my favorite spots in the Pine Barrens. It's right near Presidential Lakes, off of Rt. 70. It's on the edge of Byrne State Forest, which means that exploring there is legal. There's a number of enigmatic ghost towns in the area - Mary Ann Forge, the mystery forge that refined pig iron made at Hanover Furnace, Lower Mill, an old sawmill site, the sawmill site near Mary Ann with it's giant sized ruins and cement mounting base for a steam engine, Reevestown Bogs, Lebanon Glass Works, and Mount Misery. Despite the housing developments at Presidential Lakes, you still feel like you're far away from people. It's very calming.

I found the camp site much as it had been described. The road itself was in serious neglect. In some spots the pavement gave way to sand. In others, large puddles spanned the width of the road. The lake, which once was a swimming hole for campers, was reduced to a mere puddle, with the smell of rotting vegetation permeating the air. Trash abounded - the ease of access makes dumping here easy. Still, you could get a sense of how nice this area must have been at one point in time.

The exploring here was easy. Even when I had to walk through the woods, the trees were not dense, and there was not an abundance of briers. Along the banks of what used to be the lake, there were occasional cinder block foundations. I'm not sure if they were foundations for some sort of bathroom or outhouse, but they were approximately the footprint of a portable toilet. I have a feeling that there may be more on the opposite side of the lake as well.

Oddly, it looks like someone had cut a number of trees down throughout the site in the last five years or so. All over you'd see pine stumps sticking out of the ground - even in the more remote spots of the campground.

There's more exploring to be done here. You can see the entire gallery here.