Also too clever

The name of this blog is a nod to a project that, for a few months in 2010, was arguably the state of the art method for showing your blog in chronological order, oldest first.

It was a glorious hack involving several third party web services, javascript, 7 roles of duct tape, a pentagram drawn in salt, and the use of cascading style sheets.

The project was in short deranged, but oddly satisfying to figure out and document. It no longer works, but was fun while it lasted.

In that spirit are some tricks and refinements for images that are techy and fussy and, who knows, maybe useful to someone.

Who's going to tell you about these if not me?

Special effects from your image urls 

Maybe you have noticed that photos hosted on Google's servers have long and incomprehensible web addresses. For instance:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6OxHpGsIpsE/XIP1-X-bAMI/AAAAAAAAD64
/0IGdyXUaSCIZ3DAqyykIHvG3PU2DQ2dewCLcBGAs/s320/rgoldburg.gif

It turns out you can affect the size, picture quality, orientation, and even cropping of the image by hacking the part in boldfaced type.

For instance, using the character string h220-w160-cc creates a circular crop:

Whether you ever want to do anything like that is another question, but to know more I recommend

• Carlos Martins' 2015 blog post on Internet's Best Secrets
• Rajeev Edmonds' 2018 blog post on Fresh Tech Tips

There are still a few functioning reverse-order hacks, by the way.