My wife is away this weekend, spending time canning mucho salsa with her family in Indy. And you know what they say about how when the cat is away, the mouse will play? Well, I’m taking this opportunity to tinker away at some things on her blog, allusions. Specifically, I’ve been toying with image handling, and I installed the awesome WP Lightbox 2 plugin, and you can see it in action in this post, and be sure to read her commentary on the picture. Great stuff!
I’m also editing and re-uploading many of the pictures she’s shared, though I’ll probably get smacked around for using my subpar Photoshop abilities on her photographs. Brave or foolhearty? Probably a mixture. Anyway, one of her posts, Shoot with Rick, contains about 6.3 megabytes of pictures (dial-up users beware!). But, that 6.3 megabytes is divided up between only three pictures which would be better served at a much smaller size (dimensions and filesize), loaded first as a thumbnail, and linked to a regular-sized image.
I didn’t even notice the problem with image sizes when browsing from my home computer, but when I saw that loading the main page of her blog (which probably contained at least 9 megabytes of images, the 6.3 above plus quite a few more) on my mom’s laptop led to incredibly slow down of the entire computer.
Personally, I love that my wife blogs, and I’m willing to do whatever I can to encourage her and to make her blog the best it can be. Helping her pick out a new design for it, getting the design’s images “just right,” and so on are things I have a blast doing with her. If I could ween her off of WYSIWYG, I’d be thrilled, but that may take some time–unlike me, she probably wouldn’t take a copy of the 1000+ page HTML Complete reference with her everywhere she went until basic webpage markup was second nature. (Now, if only I would do the same with my PHP or JavaScript books!)
So keep your eyes on allusions! And be sure to leave her any comments on the pictures that you may have!
(Also, unrelated to the above post but as a result of it, I have added an “Off-topic” category to Timothy’s Burden, which I will use to mark anything which does not fit into the scheme of 2 Timothy 4:2 as well as on-topic content should.)
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Lookin’ good! Lightbox is one of the best things for blogging photos. If my wife decided to start up blogging I think I’d be equally as happy, and I’d totally have my fingers in everything like you do.