That's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics.

Greetings! Welcome to my first blog post on here.

I developed this theme for WordPress in order to try to learn the platform while making something useful (for myself and…hopefully for you too!).

Who am I?

My name is Ben Mayersohn, and I’m a Ph.D student at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. I study the interplay between biological and physical variability in structuring phytoplankton communities.

What is GFDatabase?

It’s basically a question-hint-answer database. WordPress comes shipped with two main post types:

1. Posts (for blog posts, like the one you’re currently reading!)
2. Pages (for pages that aren’t time-sensitive, like a home page).

I’ve built in a custom Question type that allows you to add a question on any topic you’d like, along with the answer and a hint if you wish to make those available. You can also assign a topic to each question, and this topic will show up under the Topics page on the main menu.

The homepage, by default, displays random questions from all topics. Notice that if you go to Topics and click on GFD, you get a link in your browser that looks like the following:

.../?show-question=0&chosen-topic=gfd

There are two things happening:

1. You chose the topic GFD. That’s good, because that’s what you literally just did!
2. You aren’t showing any questions yet (because show-question=0). When you press the button to begin, that will turn into a 1.

You can assign multiple topics for each question, in case it falls into more than one category.

Who would use this?

I would! There are a number of scenarios I could imagine using it:

• If you’re taking a class and would like a database of questions you can refer to later. Type up questions and answers, and come back to them when it’s time to review!
• If you’re an instructor looking to build an online resource for your students while focusing more on the content than structuring the layout (which is what a CMS like WordPress is for to begin with, right?).
• If you really like riddles. Or jokes. Or anything else with a question-(hint)-answer structure.