Thursday, May 21, 2009

Friends Page Architect

The friends page I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by one monumental issue. The inevitability of it is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every friends page, where I am forced to constrain other people’s web posts into a more limited format in my friends page. In the new 4.0 site, images wider than 700 pixels had a tendency to break the tables. After waiting 6 months for Swiftwulf to make an update and get rid that Obama picture that was too big, I started editing my friends script to detect images in the RSS feed and resize them.  But the [img] tag is too complex, even after spending hours researching Regex.  I was again frustrated by failure. I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive person named Bobomega.  And the problem was solved with CSS by adding the following line to my CSS page:

img {max-width: 680px;}

A whole day wasted!  You can see the beautiful results at: http://www.darkmercury.net/site/friends/ and scroll down to Swiftwulf’s Obama pic.