focus on allusions

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.)