Smooth Operator

Recently I began using a mobile device and that has made me much more conscious of the look of my blog via mobile. Today's stats show that 48% of my page views have been on an iphone or ipad. That's high, it's usually closer to 5%, but even that has grown in the last few months from only 1%.

I've been communicating with Marie of 66squarefeet about the seamlessness of her blog's mobile appearance. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. This morning, I thought I figured it out.

Because my desktop mac computer has a 20 inch screen, I designed my blog around it. Mobile has taught me that this was a mistake. I like the look and worked hard on hacks that allowed my blog's appearance long before blogger allowed three column templates, etc. etc. And when blogger allowed extra large images I decided that was a good thing too.

But, now, I need to revert back to their default large image size if I want the mobile appearance to be seamless. When the original size or extra large size is selected, the mobile processor cannot handle it and the pictures are super large compared to the mobile screen. Basically, it's a mess. Now, Marie has extra large images on her blog, so what's the difference? I think it may be the three column hack in my design template html that is keeping the images from shrinking to fit in the mobile template, but that's just my guess. Using only the large image size seems to fix my blog's mobile appearance.

Any new pictures on my blog will be the smaller large size, where old ones will remain their original sizes. But, as always, if you want to see them in their original size, just click on them to open. I am turning off the lightbox slideshow thing because it doesn't agree with me and because it is often useful in a garden blog to see the image in its original, super large size.

update: I see that none of this is true when I use the mobile blogger app on the device. In other words, when I mobile blog, it does not matter if I even use the medium size image setting, the picture is still too big. I now blame blogger.