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Google Maps Street View comes to…
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(I am so not going to get a thing done this weekend.)
via Lior Haner via Miriam Schwab on Facebook
Best.Captcha.Evar.
(IP address specific captchas?)
And in other news, Even Microsoft says stop using IE6
It's not often that we encourage you to stop using one of our products, but for #IE6, we'll make an exception: http://bit.ly/g0wt4m—
(@Microsoft) March 04, 2011
According to W3 Schools, XP users make up 42.9% of the browsing public, but won’t be able to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer, IE9. You’ll need Vista or Windows7 to do that. Thankfully, other browsers continue to fill the browser wars gap. (Chrome 10 if you were wondering…)
Windows7 and Vista users will soon discover that IE9 will be a part of their future, like it or not.
On a humorous note (I hope), “Save IE6!”
Better shared!
My Three WordPress.com Wishes: Third Wish
Better Image Resizing!
Dear @wordpressdotcom Improve resized image quality with ImageMagick Engine plugin http://bit.ly/aiSkGT #3rdof3wishes #11millionusers—
JenniferT (@wysiwygjt) September 28, 2010
Who doesn’t like visuals served up next to their written text? It adds spice to even the most well-written blog post and in the case of blogs serving up photos as the main course, images provide the entire meal. I’m not going to dish out the whole discussion around how images should be handled in WordPress, because that scope is huge and depends much on what is decided for the stand-alone version of WordPress. So, for the purposes of discussion here I’m limiting my wish to image resizing.
One of the many features of WordPress.com that I love is the ability to change themes easily to one of the over 100 available themes. While written words generally have no trouble transitioning to a new theme (unless you’ve used special fonts, colors, etc. extensively in your posts/pages), images in your blog posts can really suffer due to the automated image resizing that takes place to accommodate your new theme’s posting width. There are two aspects in play here: the image size/weight in kilobytes to speed up page load time and the size of the image in pixel dimensions (which is the main focus being addressed here).
Image Resampling: Looking at the WordPress.com Support Doc on Image Optimization, you can clearly see the difference in the quality of the two photos shown there. Even though they are the same pixel dimensions, the resampled photo at the bottom of that page (78kb) has severely lost both sharpness and color. For purposes of comparison, compare that image with this one resampled from the original by Yahoo’s “Smush.it” and weighing in at 67.8Kb:
Resampled with Yahoo! Smush.it
Image Resizing: Looking at this photo on my photoblog, click through to the originally uploaded photo (1024×768 pixels) linked at the top of that page. The photo in the attachment page has been automatically resized to fit the theme’s attachment page width, but the image quality has suffered as a result.
If you are a new blogger or one with just a few posts with images, manually resizing existing images to fit your new theme while still maintaining image quality may be an annoying inconvenience. However, if your blog has been around for a while or you post frequently or your blog is photo-centric, you may not readily consider switching to a new theme, or at least not without some trepidation. Knowing that WordPress.com has a better image resizing engine, one that would maintain your image quality, would make this a non-issue.
(For what it’s worth, the whole discussion surrounding the trade-off between image size/weight and page loading time is so important that not surprisingly Google is also getting more heavily in the act. )
My first two WordPress.com Wishes in this series: More Mobile and More Stats
Better Shared!
Top search terms-June 2008
Some of the top search terms for finding this blog from the past 30 days :
| wysiwyg blog (yep, got that) |
| headers for cutline (yep, got those) |
| ravelry serape (from NaKniSweMo-so got those) |
| photoimpact x3 goodies (got those, not x3 specific, though) |
| pi presets (yep, got those) |
| gourmet yarn store israel (got those, too; now with Google Maps goodness.) |
| wordpress knitting theme viewer (er,um…) |
| dover file download (sort of, but pi-related) |
| goodies pi (yep, got those) |
| “the flavor graveyard is” (hm, thinking the Halloween post got those) |
| wordpress.com +flickr slideshow (sadly, don’t got those) |
| p.i.’s tool (not quite sure about that one; pi’s got so many of ‘em) |
| uol photoimpact (yep, got those) |
| blog+moodstream (um, not really. sure would be cool, though) |
| pi tutorial (yep, got those) |
| cutline headers (yep, got those-see above) |
| just jennifer blog (certainly got those) |
| photoimpact tutorial (got those) |
| israel (definitely got those) |
| world record for blog with no comments (wt*?) |
If I search Google for that last one, my Live Hatikva post is #2 in the search results. =:-O
Work with me, people! Not for nothing is Crabby over there on the sidebar.
