User guide

Who this is for: anyone using OCMD Explorer who wants to know what the whole thing can do. Organised by what you are trying to accomplish, not by where the buttons are. Last updated: 2026-08-30

Every section below answers a goal. If you are looking for a specific page, the City Directory lists all of them.

Contents

• Working out what to do today
• Finding a specific kind of place
• Getting oriented on the island
• Planning a trip
• Searching
• Reading the town's history
• Playing
• Using it without signal
• Making it readable
• Accounts, and why you probably don't need one
• Checking where a fact came from

Working out what to do today

Today is the answer to "we have four hours, what's worth doing". It reads the date, the season, the forecast and the tide, and suggests accordingly — the indoor list when it's raining, the beach when it isn't, the short honest page in February rather than a padded one.

Alongside it:

• What's on — dated events, filtered to what has not already happened
• Fest Central — the town's big weekends: White Marlin Open, Cruisin', BikeFest, Springfest, Sunfest — dates, and which roads you will not be driving down
• Deals — current offers, each with the business that is offering it
• Nightlife — what is open late, by district
• OC Live — the things that are happening as you read
• News — five beats: Open & Shut, Town Notebook, Season Marks, Fest Desk, and From the Archive

Tip: Today is the only page that changes hour to hour. Everything else is stable enough to read once and trust.

Finding a specific kind of place

Every place is the full directory — every record in the guide, filterable by district, by category and by what is open.

For the things people plan a day around, there are hand-written guides rather than filtered lists:

Answers is the fastest route to a narrow question — "where can I park for free", "what's open when it rains" — as short written answers rather than a list to filter.

Getting oriented on the island

Ocean City is essentially one-dimensional: a barrier island where everything is nth Street, running Inlet to the Delaware line. The guide is built around that.

• Coastal Highway — the spine, end to end, with what sits at each stretch
• The Boardwalk — the strip from the Inlet to 27th, block by block
• City Directory — everything the guide holds, as cascading columns
• Map — every place, filterable by layer, with the bus corridors drawn

Home base is the single setting that improves the guide most. Pick the street you are staying on and distances everywhere become walking minutes from you. It never uses your device location — it is a street you choose.

Past about 45 minutes' walk the guide stops quoting minutes and quotes distance instead, because "68 min walk" is a number nobody should act on.

Planning a trip

Your trip collects the places you pin, arranged into days.

• Pin from anywhere a place appears
• Arrange into days, reorder, add meal slots
• Share — the whole itinerary is encoded in the link. No account, no server record. The person you send it to opens exactly your plan
• Offline — the trip is snapshotted for the offline pack, with addresses, phone numbers and season hours

Your trip lives in your browser. It survives closing the tab; it does not survive clearing your browser data, and it does not follow you to another device unless you sign in.

Searching

One box, at Search the guide, covering places, events, deals, guides, history, streets and tours.

It reads intent, so all of these work:

• crab cakes — a thing you want to eat
• mini golf 28th st — a category plus a location
• what's on tonight — a question about time

Tip: searching a street number alone (94th) is the fastest way to see everything near a stretch of the island.

Reading the town's history

The history layer is a genuine archive, not a page of anecdotes: 2,401 dated facts, 533 people, 19 eras and 8 narrative threads, each one sourced.

• Threads — the long stories, told across decades: the storms, the fires, the building of the place
• The timeline — every dated fact, in order
• The wiki — people, organisations and places, cross-linked
• The Record — the narrative chapters, written as prose
• Knowledge graph — the whole archive as connections rather than pages, if that is how you think

Every fact carries where it came from. See Checking where a fact came from.

Playing

The guide has a game layer that is about the actual town.

• Trivia — questions drawn from the corpus, so answering them teaches you the place
• Seagull Spotter — identify the gull that just stole your fries. A field-guide quiz and a full Gull-dex, including the winter-only rarities
• Leaderboard — where you stand
• Arcade — Jellyfish Invasion, Run the Tram, Marlin Fishing, Quarter Master, Metal Detector, Cull Ring Runner, Straphanger Hero, Pier Fishing, Beach Sweeper, Semaphore, and a crossword

Sand Dollars are the currency. You earn them from trivia, check-ins, badges and stamps. They are a score, not a purchase — nothing in this guide costs money.

Signed out, progress lives in your browser. Signed in, it follows you.

Using it without signal

Visit Offline pack once while you have signal.

Cached for offline use: your pinned trip (names, addresses, phone numbers, season hours), the pages you have recently read, the district you are standing in, and search.

Live things — tides, "open now" badges, the forecast — correctly stop claiming to be current when you are offline. A cached "Open now" from Tuesday is a lie on Thursday, so the guide shows the season hours instead, which do not rot.

Making it readable

Settings carries three, and each one applies before the page paints, so there is no flash of the wrong thing:

• Dark mode
• Text size
• Colour-vision adjustment

All three are stored in your own browser and sent nowhere.

The guide is built to work with a screen reader and with a keyboard alone. Every map and every diagram has a text equivalent that says the same thing in words — not a caption, the actual content.

Accounts, and why you probably don't need one

An account does exactly two things: carries your game progress between devices, and carries your pins.

Everything else — every guide, every page, the whole game, the trip planner, sharing, offline — works signed out. If you are here for four days in July, you do not need one.

Checking where a fact came from

Every record carries provenance: where the claim came from, when it was last checked, and how confident the guide is in it.

• A source line at the foot of a fact links out to where it came from
• Colophon & sources lists everything the guide is built on
• An item that rests on someone else's reporting says so, plainly, rather than presenting it as ours

If a place has no verified hours, the guide says it does not know rather than guessing. That is deliberate and it is the whole point: an absent fact is a question, a wrong fact is an answer.