Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
We have a few clients with teams of hundreds of writers and contributors. It's a real task to make sure nobody uploads 8 MB 4200 x 3700 images to their website.

imsanity plugin
When they do, a couple of things happen: the site slows down. Occasionally somebody manages to put the original in the post and their bandwidth goes through the roof.
While it's possible to put a hard upload limit in which defeats the heavy uploads, the errors create a lot of unnecessary administrative overhead.
Imagine that someone created a plugin which would resize huge images to the maximum size used on your site.
Well someone just did.
Try verysimple's Imsanity.
Weird but very cool branding.

By Alec
WordPress |
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
We've been properly labelling and tagging our images for years. Some of our websites get most of their visitors from Google Images.
Google Images is the greatest SEO reserve left in the world. Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts let the cat out of the bag in 2006 and told the whole world about optimising for Google images. But it's hard work optimising images for Google Images and most webmasters still can't be bothered. There's still gold - or at least visitors - in those hills.
As Chris didn't cover the technical details in-depth, here's a step by step guide for optimising your images for Google images.
Most websites publish their images like this:
<img src="/images/192a/986943.jpg" alt="image">
Where's the problem? Missing height and width, meaningless directory name, meaningless file name, generic alt tag.
Here's what a properly formatted image should look like:
Keep reading SEO Images: Optimising for Google Images

By Alec
SEO |
Friday, December 28th, 2007
Spent most of the day working on Foliopress WYSIWYG together with Peter Baran.
Our solution for the WordPress WYSIWYG and image handling nightmare is coming along quite brilliantly well. This is what the basic toolbar looks like.

Foliopress WYSIWYG toolbar preview
Foliopress WYSIWYG offers true What You See is What You Get Editing for WordPress.
- It is backwards compatible with legacy code (hello Xstandard/TinyMCE)
- It doesn't break complex forms (hello TinyMCE/Xstandard)
- It doesn't discard whole posts (hello Xstandard)
- It doesn't go haywire and create more and more nested P tags (hello WYSIWYG Pro)
- It doesn't look like hell in the WordPress interface (hello normal FCK)
- It doesn't make uploading images a never ending and hopeless struggle (hello WordPress uploader)
- It doesn't make your clients hopping mad and lead them to breaking everything (Plaintext/RAW html)
- Your drafts look like exactly like your posts will, without having to waste time with a preview function (hello Xstandard)
- You have unlimited standard undo from the keyboard (hello Xstandard)
- Very easy to configure (including site WYSIWYG) (hello Xstandard, TinyMCE, FCK)
In short, Foliopress WYSIWYG is what you always wished the WordPress Editor would do. I'm using it now and can't believe no one created and editor like this earlier.
Keep reading Site Renovation Day

By Alec
WordPress |
Friday, August 24th, 2007
I'm on a professional WordPress mailing list and this interesting question came up:
I'm using WordPress 2.2 as a CMS to create a site for a client with a small business. My client wants a portfolio page (not necessrily a WP Page) with a list of thumbnails that will each link to its own "gallery" page which will include multiple photographs with some descriptions. My client is a non-programmer who will need to update and add to the portfolio page on her own.
I've been looking at WPG2 and wondering if this will accomplish my needs. I've seen you can put photos in posts, but can you link those post photos to a WP Page that contains more photos from that category in a gallery style (such as the embedded WPG2)? I will also need descriptions about those photos on that Page. I've looked at other sites that have WPG2 embedded within Pages, but their Pages don't contain photo descriptions beyond the photo title.
Does WPG2 seem a good fit? Or is there another plugin that works better? Or will this not be possible?
Alas, Tracy, all of the galleries in WordPress stink. Both Gallery 1 and 2 are way too top heavy on their own. Mixing Gallery with WordPress would be a fatal PHP cocktail, capable of choking the most powerful server and confusing the most adroit programmer.
Keep reading WordPress Photo Galleries: State of the WordPress Images War

By Alec
WordPress |