Jess emailed me with a link to the new site wanting my initial feedback to the direction she is working in. It’s a lot different to the current site, most notably, the wider page which will take a bit of getting used to. But I like what she’s doing. This post also predates the 500^th.

To recap about the website – we were forced to close the site down in October 2017 because it became corrupted. The long-delayed resurrected version went live in late February 2018 without the video harvesting and gallery sort order (sorting the position of images on the page) functions.  A situation which the developer refused to remedy. The only additional work he carried out was to create a new ‘Website’ category in early April. Fortunately, I was able to continue uploading images and posts. The idea was to also introduce new features, but the developer flatly refused to do any more work so I was forced to look elsewhere.

Steve introduced me to Jess Murphy of BeITsafe and today I paid her first invoice.

This post predates the 500^th, but for obvious reasons, I had to make the later post the 500^th.

Working my way through the blog archive, has resulted in me redirecting 40 posts, dating from 2005 to 2017, to the ‘Website’ category.

This is the first post written since the creation of a ‘Website’ category for my blog. It is one of the changes to the site since its restoration at the end of February after it was closed down in October 2017. I now look forward to checking some of the early posts for inclusion in the new category.

Calamity struck twice in recent days. My computer died of what most likely was heat exhaustion and the hard drive proved to be irretrievable. I thought I had backed up in August. It turned out that I was months out; the date was April 6. I have lost all my contacts information and the 1,300 words I had written about my magical time with Simon on Easter Island and in Buenos Aires. 1,300 words had only taken us to day two on the island.

For many weeks the website had been under attack from evil forces to the point where we have had to close it down. This at last provides an opportunity to update the system, but the site developer is unable to say when this is likely to happen because of his workload and the amount of work needed to restore the site. Ghastly!

Today I uploaded the 70^th Gallery Page. One challenge is trying to limit the preponderance of insects. The new page contains a bird, a mollusc, a reptile, a grass, a cycad, an aerial shot of the plateau and six insects. For once, none of them are lepidopteran.

While I was overseas an email from a curator at EOL arrived stating that my collection has been updated after a hiatus of more than a year when EOL’s data harvesting system failed. On my return I checked the link and all 387 of my videos were present instead of the past year or more’s output languishing in the Encyclopaedia of Life Videos on Vimeo page. I have a backlog of 150 taxa (species) files which were ready to send prior to the harvesting failure and I will need to check my albums for additional taxa logged since. Plenty of fun and games ahead.

Today I launched a new Album with the above title. Over the years friends have occasionally photographed me filming. And a while back I asked Hugh Alexander to photograph  members of the night filming crew. During the past two weeks I took some location pictures for the Album which I then assembled complete with captions. I shall post updates as new material is added. Please note: some of the images are portrait format for which the website is not really suited. A few of these will be replaced as soon as possible but it is not worth delaying the launch.