graphics gah!
Can I just say —
The graphics scenario with web stuff has reached epic “fuck you!” proportions? For things reader and iPad now, the images have to be pretty big to look at all okay. But, on a website, they have to be smaller. In the old days they all had to be small so you are screwed there if you have six years of small nice easy to handle images that suddenly are supposed to look good on an iPad.
They won’t.
But, okay, you are a one woman operation, you just have to plunge forward, right? So you do. You increase image size for the sake of iPads and fancy readers, so it looks good on them, but you conscribe the parameters of the images on the website, so they are still big enough files to look good on the readers, but, they look small enough on the websites to still be cool there too.
And then. Freaking Twylah comes along.
Actually it is not Twylah’s fault, Twylah is actually pretty cool. It is an aggregate reader that collects your Twitter stream or hashtags and puts them all in one page, sort of like Flipbook, but not quite as sophisticated. It is lovely. You can see the new page for AFW —>>> here.
I did the Twylah page because I was trying to do paper.li, but paper.li had big problems. For one thing, most times when I’d post it to Facebook, the graphic was a great big blue “P” and the description was horrible or simply nonexistent. So while I was doing paper.li I spent a lot of my time typing out desperate descriptions for the horrible blue “P” graphic. Which never works, people see a horrible blue “P” and they won’t even read the description. I have friends afraid of hitting a link that has an RSS or WordPress symbol beside it because they think somehow that is going to suck them into a linking vortex or something. So you see my dilemma with the giant blue “P.”
Twylah puts up a nice image pulled from the page and a total description of the page in nice short prose which makes my life easier because I can stop typing out explanations for the giant blue “P” now.
But. Twylah doesn’t recognize any image resizing from a page. So, all the posts that have big images that are big to work with iPads but also resized to scale down to look cool on the blog page?
On Twylah they go up full size. Translation: Freaking huge.
That can be a little disconcerting when the image you chose for a post was a cow snout.
Luckily for you we are on the blog so that cow snout is pretty small.