No pictures today because: a. I haven’t taken any. b. I’ve gone over my bandwith allottment by about 5 times this month. I’m fairly computer savvy, but know aboslutely nothing about bandwith. Does posting a lot of pictures have anything to do with that? Up until a few weeks ago I wasn’t resizing my pictures, assuming TypePad did it for me, but I could be wrong. I am such an ignoramus in this area. Anyone out there who knows, please feel free to comment and let me know what I’m doing wrong. I suppose I could call TypePad support, but so far they haven’t seemed to notice and I certainly don’t want to draw it to their attention.
School started this week, so my knitting time is considerably down. I think my classes will be interesting, though. One is on the anthropology of linguistics. There’s some technical stuff at the beginning, but the instructor assures us that it will get more interesting later. She is a real hoot! In her lectures she makes chimp, cat and dog sounds and advises us that although one of the writers of our textbook is a “crappy writer”, he does have good points to make. She and her husband have written one of our required texts and she tells us that the best thing about this text is that it’s short! My other class is on the Sociology of the Family – a subject that is near and dear to me, so it will be interesting.
On the knitting front – thanks to all who offered advice and suggestions on Lily of the Valley. I still frogged it. There was just something about it that didn’t hold my attention. I’ve never been afraid to cut my losses. I really do have to love a project to invest that much time in it, and although I love the look of the finished project and the pattern was lovely, it just wasn’t meant to be at this time. Maybe another day. But I have started Madli’s Shawl from Interweave Knits and think this one just might make it. It still has nuppage, but not on every row. The pattern doesn’t seem quite as easy to visualize and/or memorize, but I’ve only done one repeat so far. And, in my constant quest for rationalization, this does not count as a new project, since I frogged the other one. I know, I know, as Debi so kindly pointed out, the knitting police are not going to come arrest me for starting something new. But with my current schedule, I need to keep things simple to avoid stress – and too many things on the needle definitely causes me stress, albeit of my own making. Tomorrow – quality knitting time! My husband and I are going on a road rally. He drives, I knit, we both eat out. A perfect combination!
missouristar 
I am a bandwidth dolt myself. I really don’t have a good comprehension how it all works, so will be watching this space to see if somebody has good suggestions for us. I’m over too for this month, which I find interesting as I’ve only posted half a dozen times.
I love the road rally idea!
Hi ya,
I’m sorry to hear you are having bandwidth troubles. I save my photos down so that they are 72dpi and also no larger than 300 by 200 pixels in dimensions give or take. The size I try to get down to around 15-20K per picture, except for shots where I really want to show some rich detail where I might indulge as much as 60K. Using Adobe Photoshop I usually compress my JPGs to between 30 and 50%, but to keep the detail occasionally I’ll go higher than that. I’m only using something like 2-5% of my Typepad allotment each month.
An alternate solution if you don’t have Photoshop and you aren’t comfortable learning image editing software (such as Microsoft Paint or Paint Shop Pro) is to upload your regular digital photos to a free photos site like Yahoo Photos which will compress your images for you, and then resave down the smaller version to use for upload into your blog. At least this will save you some bandwidth even if it doesn’t save you time.
I hope that helps.
A couple other thoughts. In Typepad when you go to add in an image you can turn off the Create Thumbnail and that will save a little as well.
Alternately you can go into the HTML window and add in your photo that way, linking to an image on a 3rd-party host such as http://www.250free.com, but this is a little trickier to set up (though not impossible to learn). 250free.com would have to be set up to allow for remote linking in the settings and once you post your images there you could add in the HTML to link to the image. The HTML code is hard to explain in this little window but I could write it up for you if need be.
I took a great class once called History of the English Language as one of my grammar credits. I don’t know if it’s anything like the class you’re taking but it was fascinating. Have fun!
Dorothy… what Ann said. I have to go boil like a bazillion overripe tomatoes right now, but if you need any additional help or guidance through shrinking some pics, dash an e-mail to me and I’d be happy to help. Remember that if people are accessing your old posts with photos – the previous ones that might be bigger in terms of memory – that will continue to be a drain on your bandwidth… good luck!
Dorothy- you’re so cute!! every time I come here, I get props!! Thank you!!
Can help you with the bandwith issue cause I too am clueless and I use Blogger which is different. I do use Hello/Picassa for my pics tho….very easy to use and reliable (no dreaded red x’s!!)
I can’t wait to see Madli!! Are you recycling the Lily of the Valley yarn?
Hi Dorothy,remember our talk a couple of weeks ago about Crystal Palace Kid Merino?Take a look at this blog http://burrobird.blogspot.com/,I think you can tell her better than I can about how the reaction to your comment on this yarn.I still don,t like it.
Ann
Hi Dorothy, you don’t seem to have any more photos than I do, and I use typepad as well. Is it the nasty bandwidth theft that everyone talks about?
Li
Bandwidth: Basically every time someone accesses anything on your site–the text, a picture, whatever–the number of bytes that get transferred contributes to the amount of bandwidth used. So a few things could be happening.
1: As you mentioned, your pictures could be really large files, meaning every time someone opens your site, all the pictures get opened and all of them contribute to bandwidth usage. You do have a lot of pictures on the main page now, but they load up pretty quick, so I suspect they’re not incredibly large. I know the software that came with my digital camera has some basic picture-adjusting stuff, like compressing and cropping, so you might want to check that out.
2: Someone could be stealing your bandwidth. Let’s say I took one of your pictures and put in on my site. Except I didn’t save it to my site first, I just took the name of your image and plugged it into my site. Now every time someone checked MY site, they’d be downloading a picture from YOUR site without knowing it (even though it was showing up on my site), and, in doing so, using some of your bandwidth.
There was a very popular website that decided my front page image was funny and did this a while back. I figured it out when I noticed my bandwidth was going haywire and checked my traffic statistics, where it showed the name of the site and how this picture had been uploaded a few hundred times in the previous few hours.
If this is happening, you can either change the name of the offending picture (so every time someone from the other site tries to load it they get a blank X which won’t use up 30 or 40 k at a clip), delete the picture, change the picture to a much smaller and rudely-worded image file, or tell the person to knock it off. Your choice depends on how mean and/or effective you feel like being. (I changed the name of the image, and the person got the idea and removed the picture a few days later.)
3: There’s always the possibility that everything is kosher and your site is just very popular–I know I like looking at the lace!
Sorry, that was long. Hope this helps.