As you might have noticed, I've not done a lot of posting so far in 2026. That will change in a big way at some point in the future. The question is when, so bear with me.
I've been deep in "design mode" for the past two months, trying to get things figured out in how I approach all of my work, both what you see and what you don't (yet) see. Design mode really is design, test, re-design, test, design some more, test. I've been testing ideas with a few readers, so as to get a better sense of what will really work best for all of us. That's led me to quite a few twists, turns, turnarounds, and different forks in the design process.
However, I now have a far better idea of how to make everything work the way it should, and work together seamlessly. I've now started locking down design details and populating sites.
But about that "populating" bit: I've also decided to rewrite (or at least fully re-edit) everything I've written that you see (other than news). As it turns out, that's quite a bit of material. I've now completed that work for filmbodies, am deep in it for bythom, and have begun it for zsystemuser. Once I get a little further along and am sure the designs are locked, I'll offer up the new filmbodies first to get further reactions that might result in a bit more design tuning. Once that is done, bythom will relaunch. And then I'll take a deep dive into zsystemuser, hopefully beating the release of the Z9II ;~). Dslrbodies isn't a particularly active site, so it'll be last in the sequence, probably at the end of the year.
I'm really liking where all that redesign has taken me. Modern, simple, elegant, clean, high density.
Just a reiteration: the Web has changed quite a bit in the past decade. My current sites use older technologies and probably won't last through the coming Internet changes. As part of the "new Internet" I've been learning new things, including building a static content management system (CMS) from scratch, then applying Tailwind, Alpine, and Twig to handle complex CSS (when I told my best Silicon Valley friend I was learning Twig, he said "what the heck is that?"). The new sites should respect your device's day/night modes, resize properly with clearer navigation on mobile devices that have small screens, load faster, plus have many other behind-the-scenes improvements.
If the above weren't enough to do, I wrote three new books in the past two months (one on CMS, not photography), am trying to finish updates on two more, am attempting to finish up yet another new one, and have been stockpiling product reviews to appear when the new sites deploy. I haven't quite felt this engaged in so much since Connectix, where I was managing products for a company that was growing faster than weeds and expected to surprise the world every Macworld Expo. Invigorating.
Wait, you ask, what happened to byThom MAX?
Oh, MAX is coming (one of those books I wrote last month was for it ;~). It actually took me getting main site design fully figured out before I realized exactly what byThom MAX should be and how it will deploy. Moreover, I'm seemingly constantly on the road working on more byThom and byThom MAX content. For example, I'll be at WPPI and NAB in the coming months, meeting with NikonUSA's President, and taking the time to teach some workshops, too. All of which will feed into what I'm up to. Retirement? For wimps.
Now, if you don't mind, I need to get back to work.