- 2023
- Nov
- 29
An odd thing with Flatpress…
This blog runs on a self-hosted system called Flatpress. It’s what it sounds like, it’s a Flat file publishing system. No databases or anything, just a bunch of files.
One of the odd things I’ve noticed about this system is how it pulls thumbnails and presents them to the user. Sometimes the thumbnails will be blurry, and sometimes they won’t. No idea why, save it seems to be related to the name length of the folder the images are in - and perhaps the name of the folder?
Thumbnails in this case refers to both the reduced size (but still large) images on a normal page using the img tag, as well as those presented by the gallery plugin I use.
For example, a recent post about the Fort Wayne hamfest gave me blurry images for the thumbnails. While they aren’t necessarily clear, you can generally tell what they are - not so this time. I changed the name of the folder from “fh23” to “fortwayneh23,” pointed the page to the new folder, and the thumbnails look good.
Later me wants to add some things - Don’t start your image or folder names off with a number, always use a letter. I don’t know why, but using a number will result in a blurry thumbnail. If you get this, change your names and delete the thumbnail folder in the image directory where you have your files stored!
I have other folders in my image directory that are only four letters long, so I’m really kind of clueless here unless it’s some random thing with both length and name. If you’ve run across that yourself (and it doesn’t matter if I’m using the gallery or normal view) then try to rename the folder your post’s images are in to something longer than 4 characters. It may resolve your issue.