I know you’re all waiting for my site refreshes and the launch of byThom MAX.
MAX is coming, but a funny thing happened along the way.
As you probably know, my sites have thousands of pages on them, many (particularly news) dating back 15 or more years. Coupled with my wanting to refresh most of my content with editing, extension, and better wording, I took on a massive job. Really massive. Including rebuilding the sites from scratch.
Turns out I didn’t have to do that last bit.
I got so frustrated with a continuing problem using my old commercial site software that I asked my AI a question recently. My site structure, style, and content live in a proprietary file type. I asked my AI if it could understand that file. Turns out that everything had been so well created that it did. Everything from structure to design to my words and images. During our exploration together, the AI discovered some bugs in my current software, but didn’t find any deficiencies or masking in the data structures. So first task: suck up all that information and put it in a file I own and manage. Second task, build an app that uses that file.
Today you can see (or actually, not see) the result. I say “not see” because I’m keeping the basic site look and structures intact. But what’s managing that is completely new.
The mothballed sansmirror.com site has now been completely republished using my own software. It looks pretty much the same as it used to. Except if you look closely. When you do you’ll notice some things. Things people have been asking me about for years and I never got around to doing. For instance, the last thing on the top menu bar is a search icon. Click that and you’ll be presented a search box that does a search of the entire site and lists out all the articles with your search request in it, showing an excerpt around the found text. This search doesn’t actually touch the usual Web search services. Instead it uses the data file for the site. Your searches aren't tracked by anyone.
Here’s another thing people have been asking me for (I used to do it, but then the commercial software I was using broke due to a macOS update and the developer never fixed it): every time I post any new article on sites handled by my new application, it generates a short summary and posts that to my XTwitter account (@bythom). This goes beyond the RSS notifications that have been in the News/Views section for years. While I’m not a fan of XTwitter, it’s currently the best way to broadcast a short update note widely.
Try out how all the new stuff works. Go to sansmirror.com, click the search icon in the menu bar, and type Nikon Z8. You’ll get more than fifty hits on that. All result in live links you can further investigate.
The above is now true of dslrbodies.com, too, as I’ve updated it using the same application I wrote. I’ve applied the same technique and updates to it. So take a visit on dslrbodies, do a search, browse around, and enjoy the new styles in places. There’s even a new article about what’s still available in the News/Views section.
But that’s not all. You’ve all been asking for the date of the article creation or modification at the top of the page, not the bottom. Yep, that’s been added to sansmirror and dslrbodies, too. Indeed, there are a ton of things in my new application that I’ve built that I’m not going to waste my time on adding to the sansmirror site because you will really want those on dslrbodies.com, zsystemuser.com, and bythom.com. Don’t worry, you’ll be getting these new things soon. The log-jam is about to break. I’m doing this site by site. I still have a little more testing to do on sansmirror and dslrbodies to make sure everything is being done correctly, but once I’ve performed that testing then I’ll work on updating bythom.com, and then add some really snazzy updates for zsystemuser.com. No data will be harmed in the process.
I’ve gone a bit insane with this change of direction. The tool I used for over 15 years has been completely re-written, by me, from scratch, in a language that didn’t exist when that original tool was built. With my AI’s help, my new tool also understands all the structure, style, and content I’ve ever created, and moreover, I can use a chat engine directly to do a lot of the work (“add a light blue bar behind all Heading 2 elements using the site’s primary color so that headings stand out from the text better” via MCP). Yep, that works. You can see it in action on sansmirror and dslrbodies already (along with new site-wide styles for block quotes and other site elements).
So between now and the end of the year, the existing sites will pretty much look the same and have the same content, only they’ll all be controlled from a different app, a lot of content will have been refreshed and re-imagined, and I’ll probably be a lot less frustrated and publishing more often. Plus you’ll find lots of interesting surprises as you start moving through my sites in the future. Search, more consistent styling, better organization, rating widgets, and more.
Wait, what, better organization? Yes, and this starts with mobile. With the previous site software on phones the menus became a scrolling monster. With my new app in charge, that changes to a simpler two-level pop-up when you tap the hamburger menu icon. In essence, I’ve been able to take a once popular commercial product, rewrite it, add all the features that were never done by the original creator, fixed all the known bugs (!), all while keeping the actual structure, content, and CSS styling intact.
What I’ve done is not a restoration. It’s a complete restomod. The good things are all still there. The infrastructure is better, and there’s new goodies everywhere I’m looking forward to exploit. I’m very happy with how this is turning out. One benefit of doing things this way is that it preserves site filenames and structure, meaning that news archives that date back well more than a decade are all being preserved.
Timetable:
- sansmirror — Complete, all 2235 pages. Now running completely on the new software. Missing links have been fixed or removed. A few remaining bits that should have been cleaned up earlier (e.g. sidebars you couldn’t see) are now gone. This site was my proof that the experiment with the new application worked, as the content is now all static (i.e., not updated).
- dslrbodies — Complete, all 1945 pages. I updated some styles, removed bad links, and any other issue I noticed. I even added a new News/Views article about the current state of buying new DSLR bodies and F-mount lenses. I should point out that I’ve got a lot of even older material (1999 to 2010) that I hope to eventually get re-added to this site, but obviously this has a low priority compared to my other projects in progress. My long-term goal is to make dslrbodies “complete,” at least in terms of my coverage of Nikon DSLRs.
- byThom — Goal is to have this done by Thanksgiving. There’s a bit more going on with that site, as new articles, rewritten articles, and some slight structure shuffling is involved.
- zsystemuser — Goal is to have this done by Christmas. This will be the most aggressive update, as there have been a lot of changes I’ve wanted to make to that site to make it more useful and to be more complete.
I’m pretty sure I can hit those dates, and then I can kick off the new year with the new goodies I’ve been promising (and continue to create and refine in the background).
Be sure to let me know if you see any site anomalies on sansmirror or dslrbodies. Also, if you have any specific request for these four sites that I didn’t mention above, let me know, as now that I have my own application (NewBox), I might be able to change something on the fly.