Cameras and Photography Explained

As part of my ongoing site updating, I’m happy to report that bythom.com is now operating from my new software—which I’ve called NewBox—and that has produced a wide variety of changes, even though things might look pretty much the same. 

I was able to complete this work faster than I originally planned by just concentrating on it rather than a couple of other projects. This just leaves zsystemuser.com to get over to new software and I’m ready for another few years of typing frenzy. I’m still targeting Christmas, but it could be sooner.

Here are just some of the things that changed on bythom.com when I pressed publish today:

• The front page now auto-reports all News/Views type articles for each of my sites. You’ll see individual cards for filmbodies.com, dslrbodies.com, and zsystemuser.com initially, but they’ll be joined by others in the future (tease, tease). While adding that function, I also spruced up the page a bit.
• A site-wide search function has been added (the magnifying glass at the right side of the menus at the top of the site). I’ve only archived news that actually appeared on this site, however. If you’re looking for news from mid-2012 to 2020, you won’t find it on bythom.com, as during that period I only used teasers on the news page to point to the actual news on sansmirror.com or dslrbodies.com. That said, I’ve recovered all news that appeared on bythom.com going back to 2003. 
• Dates now appear at the top of a page, a common request I’ve received. I’ve made a couple of other small user-requested changes, as well, including fixing the infinitely scrolling menus on smartphones and tablets. 
• I’m using some new site-wide styling for headings, block quotes, and tabs, plus there’s a new table function I’ll be using in future articles. I can change site colors, fonts, and other things on the fly now, with all font information being handled directly by me (no downloading of fonts from Google, who will sneakily track you when that happens). 
• Image use has been revisited, and I’ve pruned away some of extra image sizes that were clogging up the media folder. The site uses a built-in image resizing function, but this is now done from my engine, and should result in things looking a little better. I’m now standardizing on image sizes that should be fine for all Retina displays, as well. 
• The site—at least after the first push of the new files—will publish faster and be more stable during updates. You may have encountered times when an image didn’t appear but its filename did. That was just the old software cranking through everything and rewriting a lot of files. Now the site should just shimmy new stuff into place as I create it while not disrupting the rest. The site is still completely static (no PHP or database driving it) except for the Contact Form, and on each publish every file gets looked at to see if it needs replacing. If someone somehow sticks a stray file onto the site, NewBox should detect this and delete it.
• Contact is now via a form on the Contact page. Behind this change is a bigger system that will allow me to do direct surveys, as well. Emails to me now go to a different address as I’m slowly phasing out the msn email address.
• Another new feature has to do with PDFs. I used to publish PDF files on my server and you’d be taken out of bythom and put in your Web browser with the PDF open. Now, a reduced-size version of the PDF is embedded in the page referencing it where you can directly view it. This function also offers a direct download button should you want the full size PDF.
• As you’re probably aware, I have a site policy to no longer use shot, shoot, shooting, and other such words (except when I’m referring to a camera function with such a name). I used AI via my LLM to look at every page on the site and point out places where I needed to change shot to image, shoot to photograph, shooting to photographing, and so on. 
• All cruft that was left behind (e.g. sidebars that didn’t appear) has been removed. Broken links were fixed where found. Title bars have been updated. SEO has been redone. The site should be a bit faster at most things, as well.
• Starting probably with the next update, I’ll also start publishing a “new page” alert on my XTwitter account (@bythom). If you follow @bythom you’ll be notified of new articles—not just news—on dslrbodies.com and bythom.com (and eventually zsystemuser.com). 
• In the latter stages of putting the site out, I found two “privacy leaks” that I previously didn’t know about (companies are notoriously sneaky about trying to find information about you). One had to do with how the Jquery script was getting updated. Microsoft would occasionally see visitors on Jquery updates. This has been eradicated. The other leak had to do with videos served by Vimeo, where their player would leak information before you clicked on a video to play. Now, nothing leaks unless you actually play a video; at that point, you’re seeing content served by Vimeo’s site and I can’t control their privacy terms, so I’ve added this to my Privacy Policy page with a pointer to their’s, and will be looking at another way of serving videos in the future. Meanwhile, I also found several old affiliate links in the restored news, and I’ve eliminated these, as well, as if you stumbled on them you’d be tracked.
• The Gear section is completely redone, with sections for Compact cameras, Accessories, and Apple products. You’ll even find some new material, including a review of the Ricoh GR IV and an article on camera bags. Reviews now incorporate a new Recommendation/Ratings widget at the bottom, which has been updated to my current thinking for each of the compact cameras reviewed. As part of the rework, I’ve also completely updated my Recommended Mac Hardware article to include the recent onslaught of new M5 and M6 Macs. (Short answer for most of you: a MacBook Air, iMac, or Mac mini is more than enough with the right RAM/SSD selection.)
• The Learn section has been refocused, with reorganization of the articles and a complete re-edit or re-write of every remaining article. Some articles that have gone by the wayside are only temporarily gone as I continue to rework on them to bring them up to date. Meanwhile, a few, such as the article on cataracts, have gotten a full-fledged rework and updating. A few things that were previously on bythom will pop up expanded on byThom MAX. I also added an acronym explanation page, that defines all acronyms that have been used on this site!
• The Travel section is also completely reworked, again with a bit of reorganization but mostly re-edit and re-write throughout. The Galapagos mini-section has been completely rewritten and fact checked to remain current.
• There’s more coming. You’ll see that as I continue to test and roll out all the things that NewBox has been designed to do, but isn’t doing yet.