Thumbnails, Toenails

It has come to my attention that (dundundunnnn, yes, I do believe we need a drum roll here) you can actually stop WordPress from creating ridiculous thumbnails when you upload an image, thanks to a handy little setting. Of course, I didn’t think at all to Google this hatred I have for WordPress generating thumbnails, and now I realise that from numerous posts on the WordPress.org forums, you can actually just go to Settings > Media and clear the width and height fields for the thumbnails. And… apparently, it works a treat. I’ll be honest, I haven’t actually tried it since I changed my settings.

I don’t particularly think River Song is the right person to be quoting here, but regardless:

This changes everything.

This means I have an altered view of my project to create a WordPress plugin. What’ll it be now? Perhaps it won’t be a WordPress plugin. Perhaps it will be, but it’ll be really damn simple. Perhaps it’ll be an advanced non-WordPress feature. All I know is that now I’ve got a bitchin’ (excuse my language) uploader that can definitely be expanded.

I can’t say I’ve ditched the idea of a WordPress plugin ever so completely, but… now I have to get my brain thinking in a slightly different manner.

Definitely not too late to change my project now.

I didn’t quite hit 5,000 words for my assignment but after putting it together with Kirti’s (the other girl in my group; we’re working in pairs), we went at it and realised we had written as much as we could. After writing an executive summary, introduction and conclusion, we were at 9,500 words. I think we’ve done pretty well. I just have to finish proofreading it and write a table of contents. Following that, I’ll have to add the last of my references to the reference list and we’ll pretty much be ready for Thursday. Did I mention there’s a presentation? :P

And I don’t know what I’m really going to say in my presentation, but I could do that thing I seem to do where I prepare my presentation fifteen minutes before class…! We’ll see. Maybe I ought to do some practicing this time.

I wanted to share a couple of WordPress plugins I’ve been using recently. One is Broken Link Checker. Normally a lot of services ask you to pay to have them crawl your website and check for links. However, if you have a WordPress website you’re in luck, because this plugin looks at all the URLs in your website and can even change the styling on dead links so that people know it’s a 404. I find this useful for a large website like mine that has a lot of external links.

The second plugin was recommended to me by Ruben. It’s called TanTanNoodles Simple Spam Filter. Normally, Akismet should do a good job, but if you’re like me and have a relatively popular blog with a lot of traffic, chances are you’re bordering on 1000 spam comments a day. This plugin really does a terrific job stopping the bulk of it. You can select which words are spammy, and if any of them are used, you can let the user have a second chance to enter a captcha and prove they’re not spamming.

Finally, I use WP Optimize. I feel like I may have mentioned this to someone or already blogged about it, but it’s worth a mention again, even if I have. As we know, WordPress databases can end up very large, especially due to annoying post revisions and drafts. While you can use Revision Control to take care of that, WP Optimize also optimises your database tables and reduces the size of your table by quite a lot.

Anyway, that’s it for my post… guess we’ll see how my little project goes, eh?

Comments on this post

I just turned off thumbnails! Thanks for the tip! I do hope that you find a new direction to your project though. It reminds me of something about research that a guy I know wrote: “You think of an idea, and then you check, double check, triple check, and quadruple check that nobody else has done it already. If no one else has done it already, then you do it”.

Not sure if you know this already, but I’m sure that some of your many visitors don’t: You can actually disable post revisions by adding “define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false );” to wp-config.php. I know that some people like revisions, but I sporadically hit the save button every minute, and prefer to just not deal with them altogether.

I wish that the WordPress documentation was more organized. Right now, I find that the Codex is tough to navigate through. But since Google is extremely helpful, I guess that I don’t mind too much.

WordPress does a lot of things sometimes we don’t realize it does. I have been figuring out all the stuff it can do recently, because now I have the time to study it. I am sure the plugin you are willing to create will be awesome!

I’ve never understood how WordPress works. I mean, yeah, the basic blogging stuff, yes, but not the layouts and all the other functions. I’ve always loved how organised WordPress is but because I could never make the layouts work, I never ever get to use it properly.

And wow, 5000 words. The longest essay I’ve ever written was only 2000 words for a music assignment. All the best for your presentation! :-)

I remember those days when my other blogs were attacked by spam bots. Not nice at all. Every blog entry was just filled with hundreds of spam comments and I was stupid enough to go and delete them one by one out of sheer irritation lol.

Haha Oh man I know all about writing those darn huge papers and then cramming for the presentation XD GOOD LUCK!! hahaha Am sure that you can pull it off! Those are really great plugin recommendations. Will check out the Broken link checker. I find it really useful I think. :D Hope that you’d be able to finish the WP plugin you’re thinking of too! :D

Presentations are so scary!!!1!!1 :(

I haven’t done one in a while now that I think about it (a solo one). I only had to do one presentation this whole semester with a group and two people backed out! :P

I use Akismet for my Disqus comments, but I remember using it for when I used to run my blog(s) on WordPress. It’s nifty. :)

Good luck on your presentation!

And thanks for the plugin recommends! The Broken Link Checker sounds like something I should use. I thought the revisions were taking up too much room, and I realized I never used them anyway. I ended up turning them off, then running a query to remove all revisions. My db size went down quite a bit after that :)

Thanks for the plugin suggestions. I recently got my website back up and running and I’m looking for some new plugins. :D I’m finally starting to feel confident in my coding abilites, and I’ve been thinking about trying to code a plugin…but there’s already so many of them out there! Idk, I’m going to really think about it before I start something I can’t finish lol.

I hope you have a great day /wave

Oh that’s for this wonderful post! I had that thumbnails problem todau morning!! thanks a ton!
Those plugins looks very helpful… I should give some a try!
Btw Georgie, do drop by!

Good Luck on your project! :)

& I use Broken Link Checker as well. It helps A LOT. I’m especially using it on my Sims 3 Legacy website (cloudy-seas.net) which may have up to hundreds if not thousands of links by the time I am done with one legacy. :P I only just started so it is small now.

Congrats on getting almost 10,000 words on your essay. & How was your presentation? I heard your morning was bad because you overslept and got pulled over by the popo. That sucks.

I haven’t used any of those plugins but it was a great post to inform me of all the nice plugins out there! Good luck on your project

Yo Georgie! I just felt like saying that, don’t know why. Maybe because it feels so incredibly back to normal to read your blog again but anyway…

I think it is going to be a long while before I start making plugins. But if you do I’d be sure to download it and try it out. I sometimes feel like I’m still a newbie to webdesign because I don’t use those high tech plugins like the optimizer or broken link checker. But at least I can say I know what they are. :D

Big project. Aren’t those things lovely though when they are organized and you have checklists. Check! Check! Check!
I’m starting to love the teamwork universities make you do. I learned a little of that at summer camps at the university but with this past college course of mine it’s been fun working on a 15 week project that was huge, with some fellow classmates. Although I did feel the frustration of downright no communication for a good 8 weeks(!)…it has been great.

I like that fact that(unlike a lot of CMS) you can set auto-created thumbnails to whatever the size you like.
Sometimes, thumbnails are way too big or small anyway to make it fit to the design.
You can still just script it to resize in a template but we don’t need loads of variations of image. Haha. /type

Revisions should be able to handle without plugins tho, since it does take a lot of space and it seems more than just preference.

But then again I’m sure WP don’t want to take the job away for plugin developers. /um

I generally use Flickr for hosting my photos since I have a pro account but that’s a handy thing to know about WordPress photos. I don’t think mine make thumbnails at the moment but it’s good to know.

I’ll have to check out those other plugins especially the spam comments. I get well over 1000 spam comments a day. :

Hey Georgina (:! It’s been a long while, I’ll just leave it at… Life as a conclusion. :P. Subtle textures are awesome! It’s simple and random ;D.

WordPress thumbnails are annoying when you’re uploading pictures without the intent of using these extra uploads ‘~’. Thank you for the little trick! I know it’ll help me a lot with managing my disk space for my sites. Who would’ve known, 0 is allowed.

With your skills, I know you will eventually create a WordPress plugin. And with your taste, it’ll be something that many people would enjoy. You have plenty of time to think it out, unless some moron steals your idea.

An assignment with 5,000 words sounds like a lot of work. But either way, if you manage to accumulate 9,500 words, you’re definitely in a good standing. Good luck with the presentation! I’m sure you’re prepared with all of the hard work that’s already finished :).

For a fact, Broken Link Checker is an awesome plugin. I moved my sites a couple of times, and redirecting images is a hassle. With this plugin, I can edit multiple links at once and replace the url once :D! The only thing that is a hassle at times is if someone’s site is constantly up and down, it just says the link is always broken ‘~’.

Bordering on multiple spams per day is a problem when you have a big site that runs on wordpress. The only problem I’m having is that the traffic that is created by spammers bumps my real visitors off the list. I’ll try out the spam filter with my other site :D! Same goes with WP Optimize :). Thank you for sharing ;D!.

I’m sure I’ll have fun at the cyber security camp. Except it’ll take place at a university that I am waitlisted on. Hopefully… With some luck, they’ll reconsider and accept me in the school since I’m already doing camp there :X.

Graduation is just in 2 weeks. I’m not excited because of my university status :/. Budget cuts hurt :/.

Take care(:

I read this earlier, and I didn’t even know that I could do this! xD I turned mine off. :) Thank you. xD

Good luck with your plugin! :3

Omg, I wanna try a word to get a CAPTCHA. XD

Would one of them be viagra? That seems to be a common word with all spammers, omg.

A presentation? Oh, yuck.

The Broken Link Checker seems pretty cool, though. I’ve changed my blogs up so much I think it might be worth using. :p

-.- Please dun hate me for that; I didn’t think it’d really take it.

I felt like I was in the principal’s office for a moment there…

Thanks for posting the hack about turning off thumbnails. I use Broken Link Checker and WP Optimizer (possibly both due to suggestions you made to me at one time or another) and I find them both easy to use and helpful.