Louie is one year old now and I wanted to take a 15 minutes to visit the person who created him and say thank you.

Obviously, Kaori and I provided the raw materials. Kaori also worked very hard growing Louie for 10 months, and there were many other physicians who did important things. But, we can’t forget the critical role that Dr Wachs played because she created the treatment plan and performed the fertilization that made the embryo we now know as Louie.

We visited Dr Wach’s office last week. Louie had a great time looking at the blue lights in the water refrigerator, and meeting the staff. He wasn’t in the best mood by the time I took photos, but the visit was the important part.

For speed’s sake, I let the camera choose the settings, which was a mistake as always. The visit was super though.

I’m back up and running with a whole new technology, new design, and new domain name.

No more Wordpress

No more Wordpress for me… EVER!

The problem with Wordpress is that you do all your work in an administration interface that is hosted directly on the webserver. This is highly susceptible to hackers, malware thugs, and ransomware bas#%#$*ds. Not only that, but you can’t see your files. You write your blog posts and pages in the administration interfaces and they are saved in cryptic files all bound together with an even more cryptic MySQL database.

This website is a static site, built on my own computer and then uploaded to the webserver with FTP. There’s nothing to hack, as long as I keep my FTP password safe. It’s such a relief to have my content to be safe and secure and to feel in full control of all my files. I’ve invested over four years in this site and it’s important to me now.

A new website name

I also moved web host and as part of that move purchased the pixelsnwords.com domain. I’ll redirect my pixelznwords.com domain to the new domain. I noticed that the ‘z’ in the name made it harder for people to grasp the name of the site, so I’m happy to change it.

A new design

I started this site from a Jekyll design and am now modifying it to suit my purposes. It will be some weeks before I’ve settled on a design, I think. It will take longer for me to select photos to include on the introductory slider and portfolio.

The layout is very different from my previous site. The site no longer has a Photo Stories page. I’m just including the Photo Stories as standard blog entries now.

What’s new is the Portfolio page. I want to gather collections of photos with a common theme to place here. There’s skill in curating collections of photos and making them look consistent, and it’s a skill that I want to develop. The portfolio page may be a precursor to starting an Instagram page with a single theme. We’ll see.

My business site

At the same time as making changes to this site, I also moved my business website, which is now at scitechcontentservices.com.

I’ve had so much trouble over the last few months with my websites that I’ve had to take radical action. My sites, hosted by Bluehost, were attacked several times by malware and ransomware and each time it’s taken many hours to clean them up. The image above shows what my site looks like at the moment in Chrome.

In frustration, I’ve decided to move my domains to a different host and buy additional website security. I’m also moving this photoblog from Wordpress to a static site. A few years ago when I started this site, Wordpress was a popular option for blogs so I thought I’d try it. I’ve never liked it for reasons I don’t need to cover here.

It’s going to take a while to re-establish pixelznwords. I have to move this domain to the new host, develop the new site layout, and move my content. If I can do all that in a month, I’ll be happy. More likely it will take two months.

It’s sort of a selfie only because Kaori pressed the shutter remote. I wanted a new photo for my business website that was against a white background with a more modern lighting. I used clamshell lighting, which means a large softbox above and front and a small softbox below and front to fill in the shadow a little. This arrangement creates a left-right even lighting and shadows that accentuate the cheek bones and jawline. Clamshell lighting is a variation of the old Hollywood staple that has a hard light above and front creating a defined shadow under the nose and jawline. It’s a glamorous lighting pattern in that it tends to look soft and and more two-dimensional than a traditional Rembrandt pattern that looks more 3D and has more texture detail.