![]() I don’t know much about AppleScript but I know people who are, so I thought it was worth a shot. He suggested I take a look at Acorn as it supports AppleScript. He’s the co-founder of Smile, the people who make the most awesome TextExpander software. Mastodon to the RescueĪfter the most recent problem with the Anker logo, I went to Mastodon and asked my followers whether there might be a way to automate a solution. Imagine spending hours and hours crafting a story and adding screenshots, entering alt-tags so our screen reader friends can enjoy the images, making sure the grammar and spelling are correct, double-checking links to sources, pushing to WordPress, adding the Featured Image, and then having to stop because the Featured Image looks poopy. It also rears its ugly head right when I’m finally done with an article, which is super frustrating. This image size problem shows up just often enough to be super aggravating. It’s because I had to pick something, ok? You might ask why I chose white when dark-mode folks are people too. It is still annoying and time-consuming, but not as bad as all of the other methods I’ve tried. When I think it looks good enough, I have to export the file and save it with a new name. If my image is too big, I have to resize it until it fits either in width or in height and get it centered properly. If I open the preset, I can then drag my image onto the new image file and start dragging it around on that white rectangle. Using Affinity Photo, I created a 2:1 1040×520 rectangle in white and saved it as a Preset. ![]() After literally years of attempts to make it a reliable process, I came up with a less-terrible-than-other-methods process. The process to make the Featured Image look nice is unpredictable, tedious, and error-prone. And there isn’t even an “I” in the name Anker, it’s a truncated E. If I plop that very high-resolution image into WordPress, it gets cropped so all you see is NKI. The logo file was very high resolution, but it was the wrong aspect ratio. Last week Sandy reviewed a product from Anker and I ran into the problem I always run into. Now let’s say I find a company’s logo for the Featured Image so they get some visual juice from the review. That aspect ratio is a little wonky, and I’d prefer 2:1, so my goal is to create Featured Images at 1040×520. That means there’s no need for me to upload anything bigger than that. What I do know (from talking to my theme vendor) is that if I don’t have a sidebar, then my theme will crop images to 1040×650. In spite of spending a lot of time trying to create a repeatable process to make good Featured Images, I have not succeeded. And if it’s the wrong aspect ratio, WordPress in cahoots with my theme, will crop the image. For example, if my image isn’t at least 400 pixels tall, Facebook won’t render it at all. Technically I can slap any old image I like as the Featured Image in WordPress, but whether it looks good when you see it is a whole ‘nother thing. If you create your blog post properly in your content management system (such as WordPress), you get to control what image is shown. You know how if someone posts a link on social media, it expands to show the title and an image? Posts with featured images are much more likely to cause the reader on social media to follow through to the link. ![]() ![]() The problem to be solved this week is creating effective Featured Images for my blog posts. I’ve told you about a couple of solutions, but this week I solved that problem and a bigger problem using a tool called Retrobatch Pro from Flying Meat Software. Remember a few months ago when I spent a stupid amount of time automating the incredibly complex procedure of unchecking a box in Preview’s Export window to remove the alpha channel from PNG files? The problem to be solved is that images with an alpha channel have transparency, and if they’re dark images, they’re impossible to see if the viewer is using dark mode on their device.
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