So right now, we’re on a really low-bandwidth UMTS pay-by-the-day weird connection until we get Telekom service, which we were told at the end of August would come in 5 business days, which apparently means September 17th in Bizarro World Germany, but ok – a month without real phone or Internet service is not my idea of a good time, but frankly, I’m more hung up on the month without a kitchen than I am on those two (the kitchen, at least, is only a week late and will be installed on the 10th, Hallelujah, Thank You Lord).

However.

Low bandwidth is low bandwidth is low bandwidth. Now, this isn’t the old days where some of us naughty people MUDded at 1200 baud and understood what real lag was, but given the quantity of information coming down the pipe for even the simplest information request, it feels the same.

Wait, wait, wait, wait… is it stalled? Hrm, no… well maybe… wait wait wait… have a cup of coffee… forget about it.

As far as browsing goes, I’ve been able to get by by using the mobile versions of websites (except for the ones that are kept away from users by means of requiring an application to get in – don’t think I’m not on to you CNN and Google), but making blog posts is another thing entirely.

And here’s where we get to my dilemma, which is a problem even when I’m not on a sucktacular connection, but is more annoying when I am.

I love using WordPress. I love that it does what I need, I love that it’s in active (and good) development, and I love that when it doesn’t do something I want, I can hack it myself and make it do what I need it to. I’ve done that any number of times for small tweaks, and it’s all good.

However, hacking the base code is problematic, because things tend to get overwritten when you upgrade (which is frequent if you know what’s good for you) and sometimes you have to go back in and insert crap which you’d rather not. And so I really prefer not to mess with it. Oh, I could probably write a plugin for what I want, or maybe a plugin even exists to do it, but since I haven’t found it and I don’t want to bother writing one (yet…), I figured surely I could find a client that has the obvious and easy functionality I want.

See, what I want is simple. Really simple. And both the WP online editor and most blogging clients that support WordPress almost do it… just not quite.

So.

I am not one of those dorks who puts 1600px x 1200px images on a page and then uses the HTML to scale them down to a viewable size (while still forcing the user to load the enormous image).

I also do not like thumbnailing, at least not for my posts with pictures of Torsten. If I want to put a thumbnail image in a post and then link it to a larger version of the picture, I will do so; that doesn’t really suit my purposes, however.

What I want is to be able to include a reasonably-sized picture in the text of a post but to have a slightly larger version available because it turns out that most themes don’t have columns that are quite wide enough to show my pictures in enough detail, and if I don’t scale my pictures to the column width, it simply overlaps the column to the right and looks stupid.

And because there’s not a huge difference in data size between the slightly larger version and the size of the image if I resampled and scaled it for the width of the column, I would simply prefer that the user not have to load it twice – once to see the post, and once clicking on the image. Some people don’t have a lot of bandwidth, and it’s just common sense.

Now, it’s not that I don’t have a solution to this problem. I do.

I scale my images down before I upload them to a size that I think is good for viewing alone without sucking down bandwidth (and you know what I mean here – nearly anyone with a parent over the age of 50 who sends them pictures from their new digital camera has experienced Unscaled/Uncompressed Picture Email Hell). This is the “slightly larger version”. Then, in the code for the post itself, I scale the image in the HTML so that the full picture still loads, but it’s viewable within the column size of my blog posts. It’s a happy medium for me – the picture isn’t scaled much by the browser, so the quality isn’t horrid, and at the same time I neither torture the user by making him download two pictures of nearly identical size or one massive honking picture he can barely see on his screen, let alone download.

Maybe it’s inelegant or violates some tenet of Good Bloggitude, but I don’t care – it works for me.

The problem, however, is that even editors that used to do exactly this don’t anymore. I can’t find anything that doesn’t require me to go in and tweak the generated code, and seriously, if I have to tweak generated HTML, it takes as much time as writing it raw myself, which sort of defeats the purpose of using a tool, no?

And did I mention what I want is really simple?

Let’s recap – I need four things in a blog editor:

1. The ability to add inline photos from my local drive (and to upload them when publishing the post)
2. The ability to automatically upload such a photo without the software changing its resolution
3. The ability to automatically scale that photo in the HTML instead of thumbnailing it
4. The ability to have the photo in the post link to the photo file so that users can see it at the resolution preserved in #2 when clicking on it.

Seriously. That’s all I want.

If you could save some defaults and some default maximum widths for the scaling so I don’t have to click 10 buttons at once, that would be good. Also, if I could put multiple photos into a post at a time and have them obey those defaults so that I could just rearrange and edit around them, that would be awesome too, but I’d settle for 1-4.

Unfortunately, I appear to be asking too much.

Many clients (including the WP editor) do #1. Zoundry Raven does #2 and #3, though I had to do some manual stuff, and doesn’t do #4, which means I have to go in and edit the damned thing after I post to get the scaled image to link to its file. The WP editor doesn’t do #3 automatically, and while there appear to be various hacks to theme code that one can apply to effect this, sort of, it’s still not quite what I want. (Also, uploading images to the WP Media Library is one of my least favorite ways to waste time and occasionally crash my browser.) Windows Live Writer does 1, 2 and 4, but loads a thumbnail (at the resolution I wanted the HTML to scale the picture to), and with as little bandwidth as I have right now, that’s Teh Suck. I tried BlogJet for long enough to realize it doesn’t cut it either (though because it was 1 am and I’d consumed a lot of bad wine, I don’t remember why), and Deepest Sender made me manually type in image locations from my hard drive, so there’s no way I’m doing that.

Ideally, Windows Live Writer would just add some defaults for uploading the file at its original resolution (it allows you to do this, but you have to click through a bunch of crap each time you add an image) and allow you to chose to scale it to the resolution it appears at instead of only allowing you to generate a thumbnail and forcing you to upload it. Or Raven would automatically link to the original image, though it would be even better if it allowed you to specify a maximum width and/or height just did the scaling for you.

Yes, I know about the $GLOBALS theme hack to fix width in WP directly (though I should add it does weird things to the vertical resolution and apparently you have to start commenting out stuff in the core code, which I am, as I said above, not a fan of doing since updates will smoke it and I’ll have to do it again and again), but all I really want is something that, you know, does what I want!

(Yes, yes, I know, I’ll probably have to hack something myself, but with a kid on the move, it’s not like I have time for it during naptime these days…)

If anyone knows of the mysterious and wonderful extant editor which does this (for Windows, at the moment, since I haven’t decided to go through the Hell of getting the UMTS stick to work under Linux), please let me know. I’m perfectly willing to say I’ve made an ass of myself if I’ve overlooked something, but I’m tired of spending time I’d like to use to catch up on Torsten posts looking for (or creating) tools that make it simple to do so…

Today’s mess-up: converting categories to tags. That should be easy enough, but I suspect it’ll break other things I have that depend on categories, so be warned…

(Gravatars are globally recognized avatars which will effectively follow you around to gravatar-enabled sites using your email address to retrieve the correct image.)

For non-Wordpress users who want Gravatars, you can still get one, you just have to open a gravatar account first.

They don’t look right in my comments yet because I had to edit the theme and did it very quickly, but I’ll get it fixed sometime

Have patience, and pray I don’t screw anything up too badly…

Hopefully I haven’t screwed anything up too badly

Now, I wouldn’t normally post about this – I tend not to post configuration details for obvious reasons – but given that the plugin is already catching a bunch of traffic, I want to make sure it’s not catching anyone it shouldn’t. If you were mistakenly caught in the Bad Behavior filter, not only will you get a 403 page, but you will get one with a message as to why you were caught there as well as a means to resolve the situation yourself. Feel free to leave a comment here if you’re being repeatedly blocked for no apparent reason and you aren’t some sort of sucky, evil spammer. I will fix what can and should be fixed. (Obviously, to even read this message, you would have had to use the fix proposed on the error page or e-mail me, so if no one contacts me or uses that fix, I’ll never know… c’est la vie)

On the other hand, if you get a 403 error without information about why you were blocked as well as the means to fix it yourself, it is likely, you know, on purpose. As in you’re either trying to access something you’re not allowed to, or you’re not welcome here. Consider this latter version of the 403 error as a not-at-all subtle hint to stay the Hell out of my sandbox and get on with your life Don’t worry – if I haven’t already dropped this hint to you personally, you don’t fall into this latter group. I loves my readers. Just, well, not in that way. Except for that one German guy who reads it, but he’s married to me.

Anyhow, do let me know if you’re a legitimate user and there are problems.