Monday, August 27, 2007

Monday Rant: Shrink to Fit

It's been way too long since I ranted here. Sorry.

Today's rant is about a change I just made to this blog. You may have noticed that I updated my "currently reading" and "current wine production" parts of my sideboard here. Notice the awkward squashed appearance of both new pictures? Yeah, that's what happens when I select "Shrink to fit?" in the template menu here on blogger.

What, Martin is ranting about another Blogger formatting thing? Well, yeah, but I think this is separate from the crap I ranted about before. Anyway, the alternative in this case is to de-select shrink to fit and prevent that stupid squashing. Then you can't see the whole picture, just the part that's the right size.

Obviously, the solution here would be for me to edit those pictures to be the correct size in pixels, so the proportions don't get mangled by Blogger. Two objections:
1. Shrink to fit didn't have this problem before. What behind-the-scenes 'tweak' did some Blogger programmer put in that fucks with proportions of pictures?
2. Blogger doesn't say the size of the picture space there. I'm sure I could work it out through labourious trial and error, but that seems really boring and stupid. See also point 1, above - this is a new problem, so why should I have to fix it?

Yeah, yeah, whine whine whine. OK, lame rant here, I'll try harder next time.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have similar issues with wordpress. If I don't find an image that is just right, I either have to squash it or expand it, both leading to some funky pixel problems. On the mac at home it automatically seems to correct for this and smooth things out, but Windows XP doesn't do the same.

TheBrummell said...

Update September 9:

I just checked Blogger's not-easy-to-get-to-directly "Known Issues" page, and this shows up as "Outstanding" from August 9.

Perhaps this will get fixed. In the meantime, sorry for the crap pictures on the sidebar; I've tried shrinking the pictures myself to fit and stay proportionate, but no luck so far.