Meaningless Maintenance… And Mainly Just For Me

When I first started RunKevinRun Dot Com, there was a bug in the system. For some reason, a reason I never fully figured out, when I would upload a photo snapped on my iPhone the orientation would be all wonky. It would look fine on some devices — iOS was mostly okay but a web browser on a mac or PC would render images upside down, rotated 90 degrees or 270 degrees or sometimes even askewed farther…. further? “Farther” I think.

Strangely, one could click on the inline thumbnail image and it would open the source file in a new tab, the photo rendered in full resolution *AND* in the correct orientation. I tried explaining this now and again on blog posts but it was stupid and silly and who really cared and who really reads this stuff anyway?

Basically if you look at this photo of MarathonTours grand poobah Thom Gilligan, Meg Sheehan and me and you’ll see what I mean:

See how it’s rotated?  Now click on it.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

Did you see it?  It’s rendered right side up when you embiggen it bigly, right?

So anyway, it drove me nuts once I realized it (again, on some devices it all works fine and looks great; only on SOME devices did it happen — which only made the bug and glitch all the more annoying, like a rattle in your car that stops the moment you pull into the service station).  But I digress.

Once I realized the thumbnails were all wonky, I could “brute force” resolve the issue going forward by re-rendering photos I wanted to upload via Picasa (RIP… though I still have that photo program installed on my hard drive and STILL use it to this day. Take that, Alphabet and Google!). It was probably six months of posts, mid 2016, before I found a website plugin to enable the coding system I use for this blog to autocorrect the uploads and the thumbnails and source photos would be orientated correctly.

But there were any number of older posts I just left situation normal — all mucked up (aka the forthcoming internet trending sensation SNAMU).  Most of these posts were and remain as unviewed as a written presidential security briefing (ZING!) so who really, REALLY cares, right?

But it has always bugged me… and always will.  Today I haven’t gone back in and fixed all of the early posts, but I did finally go in and redo the posts related to the Antarctica Marathon (circa March 2016). Thus now when you look at the photos of me faux-Tango dancing with a street performer in Argentina, you don’t have to tilt your head 90 degrees to the right to see them upright.

Basically, no more of this:

A lot more of this:

This is meaningless I know. In many ways runkevinrun.com is just an echo chamber cave where I stare into a void, seeing hundreds of versions of me, both in front of and behind me, and we occasionally snap our fingers.

But there’s meaning therein and dammit I just wanted SOME of those early photos to be right side up.

Perhaps, just maybe, tonight I will sleep a tiny bit better thanks to a small victory for my OCD-lite personality.

A boy can dream… maybe.