Anyone notice that the featured images on post headers seemed to be a bit… well, bad? So did I, and I only just realized why that actually happens. And ironically, it was in the name of improvements. Luckily, with a little help from an upscaling AI, that’s not as bad of a problem, for now.
Continue readingBy default, the Markdown renderer in Hugo, at this point in time, is Goldmark, a CommonMark compliant renderer.
CommonMark makes no provisions for manually specifying the width or height of an image.
There’s various extensions, like those for Pandoc, Kramdown, and GFM, but Goldmark doesn’t support those.
Google is getting a little cranky with the amount of CLS on some pages, especially on mobile, so it’s a good idea for me to start specifying sizes for most images.
How should I do this? By hacking it on as a feature that is in no way the intended use for anything involved.
If you remember when I first added the Medium Zoom library, I wasn’t using one of its features: the ability to load a larger image when the user clicks to zoom in, only when the user wants to zoom in.
However, I added this later, and in that, the method I used was to use a Hugo shortcode to include the image with proper attributes in the <img> tag.
Well as it turns out, I don’t need to do this.
Now, I can have that happen automatically with standard Markdown ![image links]().
Remember the time I added Medium Zoom? Well as it turns out, as I was reading through Zoom’s documentation, that you can specify a separate URL to load when the image zooms in. I like this, because I crop all my images to be (for landscape oriented) 1000 pixels wide, just slightly over the size of the content area that they go into. This is a serious reduction in size from the resolution they’re taken at. I do this just to improve load times, even with WebP and compression, extra pixels (that get resized to nothingness) are extra data that needs to be sent. And since it’s literally too big to be shown like that, I crop them so that pages load nearly instantly. The problem is that when you click on an image to see it, you get… basically nothing. I (because reasons) don’t have any old images so they’ll stay the same. But from now on, any images that are added in will have a detailed version that loads when you click to zoom.
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