Featured Images at a Blog Near You


Blog / Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014

You may not have noticed if you don’t read this website by visiting the site, but I have added featured images on the homepage. I’m here to tell you that it’s a rather large deal.

Featured Images

In fact, I think I might have solved a greater issue I’ve had with images and this website. Way back when, in 2010 when I installed WordPress as my CMS, I was happy to have a better system than my home-brew chunk of code because it would be easier to get tasks done. I didn’t mind that not all features worked, like image uploading. However, over time, this feature has been sorely needed by me. I think it really adds to the visual aspect of the homepage to have the featured images in place. Just a little something to break up the monotony.

The problem stemmed from my host, 1&1.com. I’m on a basic, grandfathered-in package because I didn’t want to pay more for features I didn’t need. Though, it came at a cost I learned when my memory, which was enough when I signed up in 2007, didn’t get the upgrade I needed. The memory limit needed to be increased to process images through WordPress (apparently there’s some heavy number crunching going on in WordPress’s background that needs a good amount of memory so there’s no error). I had searched for ways to up my memory, I even contacted 1&1 about buying an upgraded amount of memory only but was denied due to the grandfathered package.

Since then, I have resolved to work with the system I have in place and have the images hosted on Google servers and just link to them. It’s not the best process because Google can make a change to their code and I can end up with a couple thousand broken links. But now and then I like to search the web to see if someone can offer a solution. Today, I found one.

The solution I found is actually rather old, posted in 2012. It’s also really simple and a more specific version of things I had tried in the past.

I kid you not, I was extremely elated when I got it to work. I set about adding featured images to all the posts on my homepage (the others I might get to later when I have some downtime at work). I might just start adding photos to new posts just because I can have them as featured images, is that excessive? For now though, I think where it’s at really spiffs up the homepage, what do you think?

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