Flying in the Dark

For the first time in...well, ever, I changed the blog layout. Normal people would do so to shake things up, provide new visual interest, perhaps modernize a dated look.

Not me. Nope. I did it to solve a problem. Ever since I started using Mars Edit to upload entries, the pictures have been huge. I'm guessing that Blogger itself has some magic to shrink pictures to some predefined sizes, whereas Mars Edit just sends 'em the way they are. I'll eventually track down an easy way to resize the things before inserting them, I suppose.

What this has meant is that the pictures kept getting cut off by Blogger. As Mrs. Volare thoughtfully pointed out, the picture of the Vicereine a few posts back originally cut the poor lady in two. (I fixed that by deleting the original picture from the site and manually inserting it again in Blogger, which made it fit.) Interestingly, the "Preview" mode of Blogger doesn't use the template of the actual site, so the pictures showed up just fine, as they also do in Mars Edit.

I played with the HTML code in the original template and widened the text area, which made the entire picture appear. Unfortunately, the background (a yellowed parchment look) was a .jpg stored on some other server and not something I could edit, so the edge of the "parchment" went right through the text. Very distracting.

I thought about removing the background, but seemed easier to change templates. (One day, I've promised myself, I will know enough about this stuff to do it from scratch.) This one has the text on the left and seems to allow the pictures to stretch themselves across the canvas as far as they are inclined - even if it means encroaching on other elements of the page, such as the blogroll, which is why I moved that to the bottom. (Just in case you still want to see who hasn't updated her site in over six months. Heh.) The pictures are big, which may increase page load times. Then again, they show more detail. I waffle about how quickly I want to deal with this issue. In the meanwhile, problem solved.

Anyway, a long post about a small issue.