Controlling the Max Width of Images Uploaded to WordPress Admin

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

I was asked the following today in regards to a WordPress site:

Is there any way for me to load a photo into an item and stretch it so that it just fills the column but doesn't overfill?

My first thought was resize your photo before you upload it. Then my second thought was upload it to Flickr if you want a nice sized version of your photo. But then I got to thinking… is there a way to control this through WordPress? Turns out there is. I may be late to the party on this, or there may be another way to control this so let me know, but here's what I did. Just added the following line to the functions.php file on the theme:

$GLOBALS['content_width'] = 500;

Where 500 was the widest I wanted the image to go. After doing that it was good to go. Using the "Add media: Add an Image" now within the post and selecting the "Full Size" option will place a photo that's forced to the max available space within the content pane. Not bad.

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New Site: RealDanLyons.com

Friday, July 25th, 2008

If you don’t know Dan Lyons you may know his alter-ego, Fake Steve Jobs. Dan Lyons is a technology columnist for Newsweek and the creator of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.

Dan decided it was time to walk away from Fake Steve, but still needed an outlet to discuss what's on his mind. We were initially referred to help get things started with a blog, but as we talked with Dan it became apparent we could help get him going with his entire personal website.

We created RealDanLyons.com for Dan to promote not only his blog, but his speaking engagements, books and articles. The site pulls inspiration from his new employer, Newsweek and in the interest of keeping things light and personal, Dan provided us images to use that were not the typical headshot (big thanks to Jeremy for those design skills).

WordPress & WordPress.com VIP Hosting

The site uses WordPress for management of posts as well as pages. We also made extensive use of widgets within WordPress to control the sidebar which changes through the different sections of the site.

A first for us with this project was using WordPress.com’s VIP Hosting to host the site. This didn’t mean much difference for us in the development of the site except we know we don’t have to worry about high traffic days on the site, they do. We still developed the site in a local staging environment running a standard install of WordPress. They assisted in taking things from staging to production and now future updates to the site are a matter of committing updates to a SVN repository. Nice. A huge thanks to Raanan, Nick and Lloyd over at Automattic for the help in getting things up on VIP.

Being a fan of Fake Steve made this a particularly exciting project to work on and if we can be a part of ensuring that Dan Lyons keeps writing posts like this we’re all for it.

See more of our work over in the portfolio.

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WordPress iPhone App Coming Soon

Sunday, July 13th, 2008

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a new iPhone while out in California last week, so I've spent the weekend playing with that. Coming from my Blackberry 8200 this has been a long overdue upgrade.

Sadly, the launch of the iPhone Apps store did not include the WordPress iPhone App (Raanan assures me it wasn't for lack of trying). While we wait for the app you can always check out this video of the app in action. Some highlights of the app are:

• Works with both WordPress.com as well as self-hosted blogs
• Write and manage posts.
• Upload pictures from your camera and photo library.
• Preview posts from Safari.

It will be interesting to see if/how the app handles accounts for several different blogs. Having a "favorites" list of sorts that would store login info for multiple sites and allowing for one-click login into a site would be great.

Oh, and not to skip over the fact that I haven't posted here in 3 months, I've neglected this seriously (a product of working on others blogs way more than our own) but will be picking back up on regular posting. Got some really exciting projects in the works now that I can't wait to share.

Update: It's here! Check it out at http://iphone.wordpress.org

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