SemiAntics

A couple of photos we took at Maymont Park this weekend. Click on the picture for a full-size look. Save and put it on your desktop if you like.

Cow Killer ants aren’t exactly ants. They’re a type of wasp, and if you like you can learn more about them by reading Wikipedia’s article. Here are a couple pictures I got of them this weekend:

There are probably more than two reasons, but here are a couple problems that you might want to avoid.

Many people are too lazy to change the size of an image in an HTML document, which is totally understandable. What if you have to use it two or more times, and you need different sizes for each image (thumbnails, for example)? Unfortunately, this causes problems for other people, due to your lack of non-laziness.

First, the original image could be really large, which is common now that digital cameras take 7 mega-pixel pictures. If you just plop the image on your website, you’re using up valuble space on your server, and you’re causing everyone else to download that whole image everytime they visit a page. This is a real problem for dialup users, and dialup users make up a considerable percentage of Internet users.

Second, many browsers can’t scale images well. If you try to scale an image, it may look pixelated, stretched or fuzzy, depending on which way you change the size. Even going from a large image to a smaller image causes noticable problems in quality.

So, before you drag and drop that next image into a WYSIWYG editor, scale it down or make a thumbnail that links to it.