The image reset

In the list of things I should care about, my blogposts having thumbnails is not one of them. But I like things looking tidy, so I do.

I've been seeing this too often today

Many of the images I use on this blog are sourced from Wikipedia. Not all of them - I take the vast majority of all the photos you see in the south London blogposts, and I make most of the molecule drawings in my chemistry posts using Microsoft Paint. I'm the only person behind this blog - well, aside from my friend who once contributed a photo a few years back - and so I'm also in charge of how the blog looks. 

I will admit, art is not my strong point. But I'd like to say I have an amateur understanding of graphic design, as in "does looking at this website make me want to puke". Whether you like the blog's odd colour scheme of pale pink and olive green is up to you. And for those who use RSS, this is what my blog looks like:

On low contrast this looks like Neapolitan ice cream

The image above the pink bar is the thumbnail of the post, if you're unaware of what I'm yapping about. By default, in fact I think it's the only possibility, the thumbnail is the first image included in the post. Oftentimes this means the thumbnail looks shit, especially if that image is of a molecule. Those two black bars? Those are actually carbon bonds! It also usually means the thumbnail isn't actually a great indication of what I'm going to yap about in a post, and so the title usually does the heavy lifting when it comes to promoting posts on my homepage. Not that I'm good at naming things, either.

As I said before, many of my images come from Wikipedia, specifically Wikimedia Commons. These images are, on the whole, under a Creative Commons license, which means I can use the images freely so long as I satisfy certain points of the license, typically including crediting the author. So I'm not really violating copyright law when I use the images - besides, I don't get paid for writing the blog and I'm not planning to, so I'm not entirely certain what laws I would be breaking. See short story about advertising.

That's the context behind this post. Very keen readers may have noticed certain thumbnails just...don't exist anymore.

There used to be an album cover here

And that's probably because they're all from Wikipedia, and suddenly Blogger doesn't recognise them anymore. Which is really annoying because most of those images were album covers or various metals, and I'm not entirely keen on searching for other images which could almost certainly violate copyright. 

Is this a big deal? Absolutely not. I have no idea why I'm even writing this post. But if you see no thumbnail where there should be - as in, grey rectangle above text - then this is why. 

Just another small bump in the road for smalltime bloggers who don't have an infinite supply of samarium.