Images At A Decent Size Contd..

Grrr, see that's the problem, once I have decided that something needs to be a certain way I can't stop. I am like the Terminator (no, really!). Once I had decided that the main images on this blog needed to portray the images in a half decent way, I am afraid hell would freeze over before I stopped attempting to accomplish it.

Yesterday I succeeded in getting the images to a more suitable size by using the fact that blogspot always stores a full size version on their server, even if they don't let you use it. I thought that would be and end to it, trouble is though that as you will have seen on yesterday's post update, I then noticed just how terrible the quality of these full size images are. Blogspot uses some heavy compression to keep the file sizes down, which results in a really mushy image - no good for a blog themed on photography me thinks.

So an alternative had to be found. Of course I could just link to proper images somewhere else but there are three problems with that. Firstly I want to keep it slightly automated, so that I don't have to frig around too much to make a new post. I want the intelligence in the template to do most of the work for me. Secondly, by just inserting the image in the post, the image would still need to be 400px wide max, as the posted data can only take up that much room to fit in the page design. Thirdly I don't want to hold the images on my own hosting, I want to keep this blog anonymous - hence nimby.

I solved the first two problems yesterday, I thought. By using data already created by blogspot I made the template work out where the full size version of each post's image was and displayed that full width. It also prevented any problems with the third issue. But, as discussed, the blogspot images are rubbish. With a capital "R". The only way to get around that is to host the images somewhere else. That not only presents issue three, but also then re-opens issues one and two.

The solution to where to host is pretty simple and quite interesting, for me. A quick search on free hosting brings up some amazing resources, it is unreal what you can get for nothing on the net. I plumped for 110mb.com which is quite outstanding, or appears to be so far. For free you get web hosting, you can also point domains there if desired, you get ASP, PHP, FTP etc etc etc. Basically everything you could want from a host, for nothing! There is a file size limit, but at 10MB that is not going to be an issue for this, and they are talking of increasing it to 150MB anyway! Loads of bandwidth, really seems too good to be true. We shall see how it goes. I may even host my next customer web site there, ya know so I can rake in a bit more profit.

So that was issue three resolved, again. Issues one and two were then just a question of thinking how best to automate the image being displayed. To keep it simple, you will now see a little section of text at the bottom of each post. This tells the template where to pick up the image from and displaying it full width is just a slight modification of the original javascript I did yesterday. I had to include some extra intelligence, so that it does not cause problems with my older posts which will not have the data to display the big image.

So, hopefully job done. And all well before hell froze over.

nimbyref:050906a Photo: Tank by Moonlight, nimby. Canon 5D.:endnimby