Geek Out - Tech Support for Viewing Our Blog

My dear sister Susan has once again inspired a post. This time it wasn't a post on her own blog (possibly because there hasn't been a new one for five days) but rather a comment she left here, about a problem she's having viewing things.



As a matter of fact, I DO have suggestions! I had a suspicion what the problem was, and then I checked in with StatCounter to confirm it. Susan is running her monitor at a very low resolution, 800 by 600. Those numbers represent how many dots make up the picture on the screen.

The higher you have your resolution set, the more information you can fit on your screen. The trade-off, is that the things on your screen get smaller to make room for all that increased info.

Further complicating things, is that modern LCD Flat Panel displays have a "Native" resolution, that they were designed to run at. Older, tube-based monitors could switch between a wide variety of modes, and show all of them well. But that pretty, slim monitor on your desk now only wants to show the resolution it was designed to run, and if the results are "too small" for your eyes, you can force it to display the lower resolution for bigger everything, but the clarity goes way, way down as a result.

The standard native resolution for LCD Monitors in the 17 to 19 inch models is 1280 by 1024. Smaller screens operate at 1024 by 768, which is the default setting that Windows uses if it can't tell what the capabilities of your particular monitor are.

Most of the default Blog templates are designed so that they'll work at any resolution greater than 800 by 600. The problem is, they don't grow with larger monitors - everything is shown in a column approximately 450 dots wide. It was making me claustrophobic, especially at home, where our 19" widescreen LCD monitor runs at 1440 dots across. It was frustrating seeing nearly 2/3 of my screen just left blank, while pictures had to be shrunk down to fit in the column. So I switched to this current template, which grows to match the size of the monitor it's being viewed on, and allows me to put pictures that are twice the size of those the old one allowed.

I tested the format and larger pictures on resolutions as low as 1024 by 768, and found it to work, so I made the switch. I just wasn't expecting anyone to view it at a lower resolution.

Here's what you saw if you tried to read yesterday's Rodney and Jim strip at 800 by 600:



It's exactly as Susan described, with our Sunday Funnyboys only partly visible. Of course, there is the scroll bar at the bottom, that can be used to move things around so you can see the whole thing. One good thing is that the template does format text to fit the smaller screen, so posts that have words instead of just pictures will be fully readable.

Here is the same shot, at the default 1024 by 768:



The entire strip fits on the screen! This was how I tested it before going live with the new format. Finally, here is what my stats show most people see, with their monitors running at 1280 by 1024:



Everything right where it should be, no need to scroll back and forth, only up and down to see additional posts.

So to sum it up for Susan's question, you can scroll to the side to view the whole picture, or increase the resolution of your monitor.
(right click on the desktop, properties, settings, move the bar to the right)

I hope this helps, Sue!

If anyone else has any tech questions, feel free to ask! After all, it's what I do...