Maintaining our blog

Since launching, the LibNet blog has been well used with lots of colleagues contributing posts and also commenting on them.
However, like any other computer system, the blog has a finite amount of storage space. Indeed we recently reached 100% usage of our allotted space. One more post and the blog could have been lost forever! Okay that’s a bit extreme; instead we’ve had our storage space increased by ISD. Phew.

Large images

Looking at the blog’s media library (the place where images, PDFs and documents get added to) we can see that all colleagues can help with ensuring that we don’t reach maximum usage again – after all, we can’t just keep endlessly getting the space increased.

The biggest usage of the blog’s storage comes from images that are huge both in size and file size (one was over 10MB, tut tut). So with that in mind, here are some tips to consider when adding media content to your blog post.

• For images, please only upload jpeg, png or gifs. Avoid bitmaps and tiffs especially.
• Check the size of the image and shrink it if needed. Remember that the image is being used on a web page so it doesn’t really need to be bigger than 1200 pixels square.
• Normally reducing the size is enough to reduce the file size at the same time. But if the image is very high resolution you can also compress it.
• Check that the image you’re about to use doesn’t already exist in the media library. Images can be shared across blog posts. Examples would be UCL buildings, of which there are many.
• Word documents and PDFs can often have their file size reduced by ensuring all of the above tips are applied to any images inside your document. E.g. don’t paste a tiff into Word.
• When creating a PDF from a Word document tick “Minimum size (publishing online)” for the “Optimize for” setting.

Lastly, if you’re unsure of any of the above or would like help resizing images you can contact us at lib-websupport@ucl.ac.uk.

Happy blogging!