Blog redecorating
The observant reader may notice that the text in this blog now looks rather more crowded than it did before. This is not an accident — but it is a kludge. (A detailed explanation follows after the jump. It’s geeky and tedious. You have been warned.)
You know how it is sometimes, when you can’t do A until you do B, and you can’t do B until you do C, and so on? This was like that. One of my self-justifications for not blogging has been that I needed to do some backstage troubleshooting and repairs first. Well, I did that today so now I have one less excuse.
I’d stopped the photo-heavy blogging last year for fear of impending RSS damage. I’d been hand-coding all those embedded links to my Flickr images, and the whole [ copy code / switch windows / paste code / repeat ] routine was taking a real toll on my tendons. Then I ran across Joe Tan’s Flickr Photo Album for WordPress plugin. It offered drag-and-drop Flickr image links from within WordPress. Hooray, less keyboarding!
When I gave the plugin a preliminary whirl, I found that it generated reduced-size versions of Flickr images at widths of 100px, 240px, 500px, 1024px, or the original pixel width, with correspondingly reduced heights. The problem was, I had a column width of 450px here. I’d previously put in some code to restrict max-width to 450px. When used with my hand-coded Flickr URLs, it worked fine — my images got resized to 450px and maintained the right aspect ratio too. But when I used the plugin and my max-width tweak at the same time, the heights didn’t get auto-resized any more because they’d been specified by the plugin, so the aspect ratios were all distorted. Uh oh.
Not being a Real Coder, I was somewhat at a loss as to how to fix this… and it wasn’t a huge priority item so I didn’t put a lot of time into it either. After months of intermittent stabs at making sense of the plugin code, I finally decided that rather than trying to make the plugin play nice with my blog, I’d make my blog play nice with the plugin. So I went into my style.css and fiddled with the widths and margins and padding until I could fit the plugin’s “medium-size” 500px images into what had been only a 450px space. Now I can use the new plugin, whee! No more hand-coding Flickr URLs!
But there’s a catch. Now my blog looks way too cramped, because those extra 50px were squeezed out of my margins and padding. I’ll have to do something about that… maybe I need to stretch out my title banner a bit so I can stretch everything else back out to a comfortable spacing. Sigh.