day 2 of testing RapidWeaver

as a candidate to transform Witter-n-Grunt from a rundown backwater on the web into a vital, convivial and easily-updated blog + galleries combo thingy.

Discovering more about RapidWeaver: it is just the basic tool for the job, and does really require the use of a range of plug-ins to enable it to deliver. Also, I'm surprised to discover that it's a non-WYSIWYG interface. I'm typing away in an editor, and have to move to the Preview tab to get to see how it will output. What's most amazing about that, is that I've not really noticed.

One noteable omission from RapidWeaver is a thing to make larger images open up when you click the thumbnail or reduced-size image in the body of a blog entry. See, for example my screen-shot of the weather widgets in my last post. Click on that and nothing happens. Surprising, this, and disappointing, as Blogger, which I found much dumber and less intuitive to operate, "just does it", as if it knew that was what you wanted.

Seems I need a plug-in to make this work in RapidWeaver, and the best one - which works much better than the basic Blogger tool - is called PlusKit. And PlusKit is available for a free trial demo, but only for 10 minutes!! Then it shuts down any demands cash!!

So here goes - I'm going to download PlusKit and apply it to this picture, which I've output from Adobe Lightroom with a max width dimension of 640 pixels @ 72ppi. After dragging/ dropping it into this page and shrinking it to 60% to fit, I'll get PlusKit to work on it (if I can beat that 10 minute cut-off). Hopefully that'll mean you'll get to see the 640 pixel version by clicking on the inline shrunken version


Not bad, eh. Some would doubtless say "Cool". I'll just say awesome...

Tags: PlusKit, RapidWeaver, Images, Photos