Pictures seen w/Internet Explorer mess up K2 Lite format

  • robertballantyne · Member ·

    I’ve been happily blogging away thinking things at my site were looking pretty good. I like pictures, so I use them when I can. At the recommendation of timethief I switched from the Sapphire theme to K2 Lite. It works well for me.

    Mostly I mess with the blog using Firefox for the Macintosh. I check it in Safari. It looks fine. I upload using ecto.

    Then a friend sitting at wintel machine phoned to say there was no sidebar! She was using Internet Explorer. I tried the old-now-unsupported IE for the Mac, and sure enough: no sidebar. Well it was there, pushed way down to the basement of the page.

    The problem seems to be related to some of the pics. They are bigger than the column. On the other browsers the pictures are scrunched to fit in the main column (that’s good!). IE just pushes the whole 2nd column (sidebar) below the first.

    I am sure this is not what the K2 designers expect. Is there an easy fix?

    Thanks… Robert
    http://howesound.wordpress.com/

  • mark · Member ·

    The problem is that the images are too big.
    The browser you use copes with that and resizes them. IE6 does not – it shows them at their real size.
    You need to download those, resize correctly and upload.

  • robertballantyne · Member ·

    Oh no!

    That’s a lot of work.

    I think I was happier blissfully unaware that people with MS products couldn’t play in my sandbox.

    Too bad they aren’t just a little fringe group that I could ignore.

    Thanks for the speedy reply.

  • timethief · Member ·

    This tells you the maximum size limts for all the themes. It’s easy. You put images into microsoft paint or photoshop and size them to fit in advance of uploading. http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/how-big-can-my-images-be/
    http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/05/08/optimise-your-images/
    Another alternative is to only mount thumbnails in your blog and link them to full sized images which are hosted for free offline at zooomr, photobucket or flickr, etc. Your readers then have the option of clicking and seeing any photo full size or not. This is particularly a boon to dial up readers because all your pages will load more quickly.

  • robertballantyne · Member ·

    Timethief to the rescue again. Thanks. Interesting that the list in your first link didn’t include K2 Lite… but if this article is correct http://engtech.wordpress.com/2006/11/07/wordpress-theme-review-chaotic-soul-tarski-unsleepable-k2-lite/ then in a table it says that the max image width is 500px. I am concerned about the correctness of that source because it assumes that the software will “squish” wide images (which it does not do with IE).

    Most of my pics that are a problem are not uploaded to wordpress.com, but are pulled in from flickr. I like to use medium size images from flickr as thumbs to open a nice big pic if the browser wishes. Unfortunately, this is not facilitated by ecto (or the wordpress.com interface) so the urls of each need to be assembled in a tag with along with alt and title. That kind of hand coding (even with the help of PageSpinner) takes a lot of time and often results in errors.

    ;) On the “about” page of my site I’ve acknowledged the problem and promised a fix sometime after the holiday. I’d rather write new posts than manage this refurbishment project. Thanks again.

  • timethief · Member ·

    You’re welcome. :)

  • robertballantyne · Member ·

    Am I visiting with family this morning. Or wrapping a present? No, I am fussing with the HTML code for pictures on one of my blogs. Yippee! Problem solved. So how do I add a [Resolved] to the thread heading so other folk know there is a solution here?

    And, whew, the solution is fairly easy.

    I thought that the problem meant that I had to have the pictures from the other web site be pre-sized for WordPress. Fixing all of those, and then re-attaching them to the blog would have been a nightmare. That is not necessary (it is probably best if the original image in flickr is a bit larger).

    All I needed to do was re-size the image in the edit field of WordPress. There are 2 ways to accomplish this.

    1. The easy way. Using the [Visual] version of the edit box, click the picture to select it. Simply resize it by sliding one of the corner-handles in toward the middle of the picture. With the K2 Lite theme, the width must be less than 500 px. Using the corner handles maintains the proportions of the image. After you have re-sized, look at the size in the [Code] version of the edit box. After you have done a couple you will be able to judge the size just by looking as you re-size. That’s it!

    2. Using the [Code] version for editing, in the src= tag for the image change the values for height=”hhh” width=”www”. If you like the height you could leave that and just change the width to something less than 500. That will scrunch the width of the image and leave the height. This is what was happening automatically when a browser used Firefox and Safari.
    ___________________

    This seems to work when I check this out with the Internet Explorer 5.2 for the Macintosh. That’s the most recent version for the Mac, and the browser is no longer supported by Microsoft. I will still have to check this with some wintel versions. And probably Opera and iCab too. If you have these browsers, or use a wintel machine, perhaps you could check the top page of my blog (url above in this thread) and see if the sidebar appears at the top. Let me know, or post here. Thanks.

    Happy holidays!

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