If you are a regular visitor to my small group of websites you might have noticed that hevelonian got a small facelift recently, corresponding to the release of wordpress 3.0. The most important change for my current purposes is the width of the photographs we’re now using has increased from 500px to 640px.
A primary aesthetic reason for doing this is the influence of The Big Picture – this has really set the standard for photo blogs for me, and while our photos are nowhere near as good as those, the size things are presented definitely makes a difference in how viewers reflexively assign merit to them.
So, four days ago I decided to update everything I could (within reason – we have 3300+ posts) to a width of 640. And today, magically, mercifully, flickr announced an upgrade. From now on two different “medium” sizes will be available, the prior 500px and the new wordpress standard 640. This is fantastic news. For one we won’t have to load the larger images and downsize them in browser with the width tag (for horizontal images, anyway). Also, given the changes to the way “blog this” works we may well get the 640 option direct to wordpress from within flickr, which is totally old people proof.
So cheers to the new flickr layout and size option! The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
Wow, it’s as though you and Flickr were sharing a brainwave….