Lots of bloggers love to include images with their posts. As you may have guessed by now, I'm not one of them, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to spice up your content with some eye candy. However, it pays to do a little preparatory work before uploading that graphic.
Lots of images that are used in blog posts wind up being high resolution, meaning that they have a lot of pixels. The width of such images typically is much more than the width of the column where blog posts are displayed.
The image upload feature on our blog post editor supports resizing the image, but the resize is accomplished through a
So what is a blog author to do? The advice I give is to pop open the image in an editing tool and resize it to a smaller image that already fits within the confines of the post. However, not everyone has an image editor tool installed on their computer, and even then it can be a bit intimidating using professional quality tools. What other options are there?
A recent post on Lifehacker comes to the rescue. On Thursday they ran a story about Phoenix, a Flash web application that can be used to do a lot of things that you'd expect in a professional grade tool like Photoshop. According to the post's author, the tool is accessible enough for a beginner so that they can start doing useful operations rather quickly. To help smooth the learning curve, there is an ample selection of video tutorials.
Phoenix is still in beta, so the usual caveats about not-quite-ready software should apply. It is part of a suite of graphics tools known as Aviary that is available in two versions: a free basic app and a subscription software as a service package. Given the application's low price and high portability, the case is very compelling.
Lots of images that are used in blog posts wind up being high resolution, meaning that they have a lot of pixels. The width of such images typically is much more than the width of the column where blog posts are displayed.
The image upload feature on our blog post editor supports resizing the image, but the resize is accomplished through a
style attribute on the img tag in the underlying HTML. The gargantuan image is hosted on our server as a gargantuan image, and it gets downloaded to the reader's browser as a gargantuan image. It isn't until the browser renders the HTML on screen that the picture gets resized. This increases the time needed to completely loaded page.So what is a blog author to do? The advice I give is to pop open the image in an editing tool and resize it to a smaller image that already fits within the confines of the post. However, not everyone has an image editor tool installed on their computer, and even then it can be a bit intimidating using professional quality tools. What other options are there?
A recent post on Lifehacker comes to the rescue. On Thursday they ran a story about Phoenix, a Flash web application that can be used to do a lot of things that you'd expect in a professional grade tool like Photoshop. According to the post's author, the tool is accessible enough for a beginner so that they can start doing useful operations rather quickly. To help smooth the learning curve, there is an ample selection of video tutorials.
Phoenix is still in beta, so the usual caveats about not-quite-ready software should apply. It is part of a suite of graphics tools known as Aviary that is available in two versions: a free basic app and a subscription software as a service package. Given the application's low price and high portability, the case is very compelling.
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