current gruntwork

When I refreshed the layout of this humble blog a few months ago, one of my main goals was to be able to post larger photos. Flickr added a new "Medium - 640" size as part of their site redesign last year, so I widened the blog's post widget to accommodate photos that size (typically 640 x 427 for DSLR photos, 640 x 480 for the old point-n-shoot, roughly 640 x 640 for square-format Holga pics).

I still think the new design's great and I'm really happy about it and so forth, but it introduced a new problem: I now had 5 years of old posts with photos that were too damn small, thus introducing new ugliness where it didn't exist before. So there's nothing for it except to go back and swap all the photos out for bigger ones. Oh, and update embedded Google Maps, Flickr slideshows, YouTube videos, etc., while I'm at it, because now all of those are too small as well.

As you can imagine, this is a long and tedious search-n-replace job, and I'm nowhere near done yet. I started by updating the posts that get the most traffic, and then began updating less popular posts when they got occasional search hits. Now I'm slogging through roughly in reverse chronological order, updating anything I haven't touched yet. I've done most of 2010 now, and plus big chunks of 2006 (when I got tired of looking at 2010), plus the aforementioned demand-driven ones here and there in between.

I have a nagging feeling that it would be faster if I cooked up something using Perl and the Blogger API, but I do kind of enjoy going back and looking at old posts now and then.

So, in short, I apologize for the dearth of posts with actual words in them of late. Feel free to go wander through the archives. It's possible that your favorite post here (and you do have one, right?) has been updated and is all shiny and new-looking now. And if not, I'll probably see the visit in my blog stats and go update it, so feel free to check back in a couple of days, assuming you're really that interested. Or hey, go ahead and leave a comment if you prefer, and nominate something to be updated. Technically I suppose you could suggest switching something back to puny 2006-looking photos, although I have to say I'm probably not going to act on that.