Get That Journal Slim and Trim

As you may imagine, I get a lot of
e-mails with problems, complaints, and of course -- the occasional bit of
praise. I've noticed a common complaint from you guys out there in J-Land,
though, and it's a relatively easy fix.

Many of you have
written in to say "Help! My journal is too wide and a) I can't see my "edit
entry" buttons, or b) the text goes WAAAY over to the right and you have to
scroll back and forth to read the whole entry." Joe has covered this before, but I wanted to revisit
the topic.

You may have noticed that this only happens on
your main page, not on the individual entries themselves, or in archived
entries. Let me explain what's happening here.

J-Lander
Sassydee50 has
been kind enough to allow me to use her as an example, although this is a very
common problem. Be sure and thank her in her comments.

These
screenshots were taken a while ago, and may not reflect her journal's current
state. So here's her Journal as it appeared to me earlier this week.


If you take a look at the arrow marked
#1, you'll see that the "About Me" column
is wider than usual -- take a look at mine for comparison's sake. The Journaler
has put something in her "About Me" column that is widening it past the default
setting. The usual culprits for this sort of thing include animations, photos,
long URLs pasted in there or changes to the Journals' actual CSS that force the
column to widen. You only have a finite amount of screen space before the scroll
bar appears, so a wider "About Me" Column means less room for text to appear in
individual entries.

This can also look like absolute hell in out-of-client
browsers. Try looking at journals with widened "About Me" columns in Firefox,
Safari, etc., and you'll see what I mean.

But when you view
an entry by itself: no "About Me" column, so no problem.

Now
take a look at arrow #2, above. See there? The text
scrolls waaay off the page, and there's the scroll bar. Something's up here, and
it's not just the "About Me" column. You'l have to take my word for this if
SassyDee50 has fixed it already, but if you were to scroll down the page,you'd
see that all the entries below it have the same problem.

So,
in this case, here's what I'd do to diagnose the problem. Take that scroll bar
and push it all the way to the right. Then just scroll down the page and see
what sticks out furthest. Like this photo:

Sweet fancy Moses, that's a big photo. How big, you ask?

That's big. In this case, I'd advise resizing the photo to
no more than 550 pixels wide. Anything past that is the blog equivalent of
smoking at a gas pump.

Except it's not dangerous to other
people or their property. Please bear in mind that your blog is yours, and you
can do whatever you want with it -- I'm just offering this as a solution to
folks that want one.

Also, please be aware that there are any number of
reasons that your Journal would not display correctly, including CSS problems,
embedded tables, etc. I'll be blogging about those issues in future posts. As
always, please mail me with questions or leave them in the
comments.

Tags: AOL
Journals, tutorial, page
width, image size