About this site...
Martin's Marine Engineering Page - www.dieselduck.net
About this site...
Martin's Marine Engineering Page - www.dieselduck.net
Future plans Who's responsible for this site ? Contact information Comments
What you will find find here
Chances are you are here because you are interested commercial ship, structures and the people who operate them. I always have been, so its only logical that I became a Marine Engineer.
On this site you will find tidbits of information about the Marine Engineering field, and the Marine Industry as a whole. As I have gone through the steps of becoming a licensed engineer, I had many questions and observations. Over time I realised that I wasn't alone with those questions and observations, so I though I would commit to "paper" and share them with my peer to seek their interaction and consensus.
I strive to keep Martin's Marine Engineering Page - www.dieselduck.net interesting for seasoned Engineers, but my main target audience is the student, young engineer or general public curious about our trade.
Should you have any technical or professional questions, I will answer them, or direct you to an answer. I strive to make sure the information presented here is accurate, should you find something which is questionable, let me know. Having said that, I remind you that I am human and prone to errors, therefore I make no guarantees that information is "100% the truth". Don't hesitate to contact me, just remember that I am a sailor and I am away from home for months on end, but I reply to all my emails, sometimes it late.
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Who's responsible for this site?
For the most part, me, Martin Leduc. I live with my spouse and our two kids in the port city of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, on Canada's West Coast.
I began building this website in 1999, the final year of my four year Marine Engineering Apprenticeship, sailing on various vessels with the BC Government Ferry Fleet. I then sailed as an Engineer / Assistant Engineer with the Canadian Coast Guard for three years, and in 2003-4, I worked for Disney Cruise Line. Until I joined Smit Marine Canada in March 2007, I worked as a Second Engineer with Royal Caribbean International. To find out more about me, check out my resume.
These pages are maintained by me. Maintaining them are my hobby, and they generate minimal revenue. It is my hope that one day, this site can experience an increased in the scope of information, quality, and quantity yet be self sufficient. That is why I solicit advertisers and donations.
I put together the site but many people over the years have contributed a great deal of items and comments (BTW - Thank You!), and that is why its the success it has been. You can see where I get some of my inspiration and find out who has helped here.
Why Dieselduck ?
I don't get that question too often anymore but you may be curious. Diesel Duck kinda fits who I am.
I spent eight years in large school in the US, for some reason people were always referred to by their last name, I think it was meant to be "Mr. Leduc", but it really ended up being "Leduc". Well, being French Canadian and in Kansas, it was only a matter of seconds before someone mispronounce my name to Lettuce, Leeduck, Le doook and the likes. The most common became "La Duck", so why fight it.
I always had a propensity towards anything that moved and especially big heavy diesel powered movers. So when later in my early adulthood and in mechanic school, most people thought I was taking baths in diesel because, I was always tinkering on engine and reeked of the stuff. Truth be told, the wife always loved it (yeah - were both pretty strange people). So the two of us stuck together nicely as did the nick name, and I figured it was a shorter to register as URL than www.martinsmarineengineeringpage.com - and www.mmep.com was already taken, so there is the full story.
A few years later, I happen to glance to the navigational chart of the southern BC coast, when I saw the Duck Lake next to Martin Lake, so I guess its just fits nicely and is meant to be...
Future plans
There is so much to do with so few resources - principally, time. In the near future:
Commercializing the site. The main project right now, is to increase content quality in order to generate revenue so the site may be self sustaining. If you are interested in the "sustaining" part, email me your ideas.
There is no end to the sky and the water.
- Albert Camus
Technical stuff
This web site was designed using Microsoft Front Page 02. The fonts colors and layout is best experienced with 1024x768 (17 inch monitor) resolution and using the Internet Explorer or Firefox browser.
Comments, Suggestions & Contact Information
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Other information
The site's Privacy & Copyright Policy can be found here.
Information on advertising with Martin's Marine Engineering Page - www.dieselduck.net can be found here.
Milestones for www.dieselduck.net
Many milestones have come and gone and they have provided me with much to be proud of. In May 2007 I signed on my first official sponsor, Faststream Recruitment, which has given me the capital to move the site - yet again - to some very serious servers. For those who speak "internese" let me throw some numbers at you. The new site is hosted with DreamHost based at the Los Angeles Airport in the US, the statistic are just amazing considering where the site first started. The new site can occupy 170 gigabytes of hard disc space, and the monthly traffic (bandwidth) can reach 3 terabytes. To put it in perspective, in May 2007, the busiest month so far (the site has grown in traffic every month since its inception), the site occupies about 200 megabytes of space, and the 1000 daily visitors use up about 10 gigabytes of bandwidth.
When I patch together the first version of the site back 1999, the main content (writing) occupied about 4 megabytes of space. The picture area occupied about 17 megabytes. At the time I was using my ISP's servers; they offered 5 separate web spaces of 5 megabytes, that's why the site was always so barebones, pictures ate up so much room. The picture archive was a disaster to maintain, because of the different web spaces that had to be coordinated. Every time I made a change I would have to change a quadzillion links and such. It was all very frightening. Over time, I stole some web space from some of my buddies, each time the site grew by 5 megabytes and a ton of headaches. My ISP eventually raised the web space quota to 20 megabytes per email address, I thought I had won the lottery - wow I had 100 megabytes! The site grew accordingly and I breathed a little easier.
A couple of years ago my friend, who ran his own internet business, offered some space on his servers at a reasonable price. I jumped at the offer and that's when the site really grew. I could finally put the whole site under "one roof" which made my life easier. Since then the site has more graphics and I am no longer constrained on the size and types of files I put up.
Traffic grew and that became a bit of problem for my friend's servers, that, and the fact that he sold his business, it was only a matter of time before I had outgrown my server welcome. With the new move, the horizon if far far away and I believe the worries of space and traffic are quite done. Hopefully you will see some subtle changes, all the "bells and whistles" ie. the Job Board, Galley Wireless etc will slowly come under the one roof that is www.dieselduck.net. Since space is no longer an issue I though it would be nice to see how the site has grown in pictures, you can find out what happened and when on the "Whats New" page, but below is how the site has graphically morphed into what it is today.
This was the look of the site from 2002 - 2004. I liked this look, it was small easy to navigate and functional. It was my Google inspiration. I spent considerable time and drew up various ways I wanted the site to look and then I had my "Focus Group" (our ship's cadets) review the options I presented them, and they suggested some changes and the look above was born.
I seem to have long ago deleted the first versions of the site when they first came out in the late 1990s. Back then allot of people used dial up internet service, including myself, so I had to make sure the site was very small and quick to load. Lots of content but few graphics was the ideas, but I like visually stimulating web site, so I had to come up with the KISS page (Keep It Simple Stupid - pictured above) when I switch to broadband internet service and added more graphics to the site. It is basically the oldest snapshot of what the site looked liked before.
This was my favourite look, and probably my favourite version, the picture at the top is a great shot of Hubbard Glacier, and I love that picture of my son too. I tweak the new format after 2004 to be a bit more advertising friendly and more inline with other website's layout (professional). This is much the same format that it is now, in May 2007. This format allows me to make some changes with high visual impact without having to spend 2 weeks doing it. I have a system now where the picture at the top can be easily changed to give the site a fresh look. With this version I started using CSS which helped unify the look of the site. Unfortunately my web skills are at their max, so to do what I wanted to do I had to resort to frames, which irritates me. But oh well, its a hobby...
Below is the first version of the "new look" (above) I later changed the graphics around and menu too to be easier to navigate. With this new look came the new servers at Catapult and I registered the www.dieselduck.ca domain. I have recently registered the www.dieselduck.info as well, to go with the new web servers.
One of the most satisfying milestone is Martin's Marine Engineering Page - www.dieselduck.net's ranking by the search engines. Google has revolutionized the internet with it's search engine in relation to your search. Another words if you are looking for something, they devised a way that gives you the most content rich, relevant site to your search based on various proprietary factors, not just the most aggressively marketed website to sell you stuff or whatever.
In Summer 2006, www.dieselduck.net ranked #2 on Google, occasionally #1, and #1 on Yahoo as well. Not bad for a hobby site with almost no marketing done, just word of mouth, great content, great visitors and their contributions ! Even with over 80,000,000 documents Google searches it continues to rank very high in both benchmark setting search engines.
Traffic is always growing at www.dieselduck.net, below is my basic counter I used to use in the "old days". The monthly visitor tally ending on Nov 22, 2002 was 3703. Shortly after, the site passed the 50,000 visitor mark and now, May 2007, sits around 700,000 visitors - roughly 30,000 sessions every month. I can remember getting gitty when I had 5 visitors a day on the site. The breakdown of area your are coming from remains pretty steady though, with the majority from Canada at about 40%.
Onward and upward ! The story will continue to unfold. Thanks for being a part of it.
