When I use GIMP and even Postie, I use a JPEG quality setting of 75. This seems to make reasonable small thumbnails for my blogs and even does a good job when the image is 575 px. On average, the 240px thumbnails are between 10kb and 20kb while the larger images are 50kb to 70kb. These sizes make it possible for readers using telephone modems and dial-up service to still have a chance to read the blog without falling asleep waiting for the page to load. I would like the pages to be even smaller but I use images in nearly every post so a typical page size is between 400kb and 500kb.

What I liked about WLW was that it took my basic images and create both a nice thumbnail with drop shadow effect and created all the necessary linking to the full size image. Postie did this too. The difference was I had to add the drop shadow to the big image and exaggerate it so that the thumbnail would have it when Postie scaled it down. Also, Postie make all thumbnails the same size and there was now way to control it on a post-by-post basis.

So, to get the control that I wanted I switched back to WLW but then I needed to find a fix for the larger that desirable image results. This is where that PHP comes in. I have created a crude but effective WordPress plug-in that detects JPEG files in uploaded posts and re-compresses them automatically. I even gave it a crude name “jpeg-quality75″.

You can download jpeg-quality75 here if you are interested. The install is very simple – unzip then upload jpeg-quality75.php to your WordPress plug-ins directory and activate it. It has not admin or settings.

The plug-in works by hooking the wp_handle_upload function in WordPress. This function is called for every file uploaded, the plug-in checks if the file type is a JPEG image and if so, locates the image, opens and re-compresses it using a quality setting of 75, and then stores the result back in the original location, overwriting the original. It leaves PNG and GIF files alone.

I’ll be checking it’s results for a few days but it seems to be doing a good job without corrupting my photos and graphics.

I still have a couple of “enhancements” (or “hacks” depending on your point of view). These I must manually edit back into the code stream each time I update. These include the ability to turn off the implicit output from wp_list_categories() function. I need to get back the output for further markup so I don’t want the function to stream the output automatically. I also still tweak the “more” behavior. WLW includes a new-line when I insert the break for excerpt and I usually want the “more” tag to fall right at the end of the line.

WLW also was missing a couple of real basic blogging features. The most common one noted in the forums was the ability to insert a slit/more/break in the post.

I worked around this and the need to dynamically add categories. I hacked my XMLRPC interface to interpret a few extra markups. Those “enhancements” have serviced me well.

The latest beta of WLW eliminated the need for one of those hacks – with the addition of the “spilt” command. (Update: WLW’s implementation of “split” is a bit harsh. If you place the slit in the middle of a paragraph, it breaks it into two. Further, when the whole blog entry is viewed, it still have a break where the “split” was inserted. Fortunately, my hack still works.)

While it appears there are no image controls, the good news is that images are not getting bigger. That will save me a lot of manual effort with my posts !

Is instant messaging the death knell for email?

I think the answer is “no”. What I do believe is that individuals will gravitate to a single interface to whatever content they use most.

Email, IM, Blogs, Web, and applications all have their own user interfaces. When these start to have standard protocols, file formats, and interfaces, users have the option to choose the user interface that they like best.

Consider POP3 email. Users today have a wide array of choices, from simple web based HTML interfaces to rich JavaScript laden web interfaces to operating system supplied thick clients like “Mail” and “Outlook Express” to free open source clients like Thunderbird to commercial clients like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.

Blogs are also evolving open standards and open interfaces. This allows end users to again make their own choice of clients.

I think instant messaging is likely to follow suit. It is not happening fast but it is happening. We are moving from proprietary and isolated services to interconnected services. At the same time, we are moving from single service clients to multi-protocol clients. Both of these moves are attempts to give users choices. Eventually we may reach a common protocol such as a future version of XMPP.

Now back to my original point. I think the next move it for client frameworks. As a matter of fact, it’s not really the “next” move since it is already happening. There are client frameworks that allow a user to combine blog readers, instant messaging, and email into a single user interface.

This, I believe is the right direction. However, I caution anyone or any company who believe *their framework should be *the* framework. This is counter to open standards and user choice.

So what frameworks are out there today that *work* for you ? What collaboration functions have you integrated ? I’d be interested in comments <hint> !

The problem for me is that I am using “categories” more like keywords. this is how my Tag Cloud is generated.

Well, long story short, I have written the necessary PHP code to extract a list of keywords from the body of a post and convert them to category entries. It matches up existing category values and creates any missing ones.