Mike DiBenedetto dot com

Inertia is the only thing more powerful than self interest.  As a result, default settings on the programs and web services we use are among the most powerful influencers of our behavior when we use computers.  These defaults often have interesting unintended consequences.

Consider this: when Microsoft changes the default font in MS Office, the lives of thousands, nay millions, of trees hang in the balance.  One page of Times New Roman 12 point text can hold 3,726 characters, or 292 words in a sample page of text.

Substitute Arial for Times New Roman and you can fit 2,944 characters, 252 words of sample text, which is roughly 79% of the total for Times New Roman.

Now try Calibri, which Microsoft just made the standard in MS Office 2007, and you can fit 3,300 characters, or 276 words, which is about 88% as much as Times New Roman.

Now think about a few consequences:

Millions of students around the world write papers every week whose length is determined not by word count but by page number.  With Microsoft’s recent default switch, the majority of students who don’t ever change the default font in Word will now be writing papers that are around 90% as long as those turned in a few years ago.  That means that a substantial number of trees will not be needed for papers and that students will have more time to do things like get in trouble or start billion dollar companies.

By not customizing your default image size settings in wordpress, you risk having badly sized images.

After I wrote the previous post on this blog, I was very unhappy with the tiny size that I choose for the Reddit screenshots.  Actually, I didn’t choose them at all.  It was the default settings for medium sized images in WordPress 2.7.  I tried using the large image setting but it was too big for my column width.  Sure, I could have manually resized the image but I didn’t.

That’s because default settings are powerful things.  They determine way more of your life than you’d probably like to admit.  I will be posting a short brainstorm in the coming days about the ways that changing common default settings could drastically alter our lives.

For now, I’d like to make a few suggestions about changing your image size default settings in WordPress 2.7.

Step 1: Click on “Media” in the Settings Menu

Step 2: Set the Medium Size width to half of the width of your main column and the Large Size width to a few pixels less than the full width of your main column.

Changing default image sizes saves time and makes your blog look better.

By having the large size correspond to your maximum width, you can easily make images take up the entire column.  And by setting medium size to half the width, you can easily insert images that can float to the left or right and have text wrap around them.