Setting up a WordPress blog is an easy way to do frequent posts, much easier than using a web development tool and uploading the files. One issue that causes some problems is the image size with prior postings.  Although this seems to be addressed with version 2.51 of WordPress you may have a lot of postings with a prior version that don’t contain the needed code to resize the image to fit within the blog column.

To fix those you have two choices. You can either resize the image before you upload so the width is around 450 pixels (this should work with most themes), or you can set the image size in the html code so the image is resized properly.

Some themes, such as the WordPress default theme, do a pretty good job of resizing of image but when you switch to a different them, you may see that larger image spills over. To fix it without the need to set the display size for each image if it is too wide. Here are the simple steps.

• Edit the post
• Select the Image
• Select the button to insert/edit an image
• Set the width to something like 450 (I use 470 on some themes)
• Leave the height measurement blank
• Change the Alignment if you want.
• Click Update

This basically will write the html code for the image size. If you leave the height measurement blank, most modern browsers will resize the image proportionally to fit the width you set. If you enter both the width and height measurement be sure to keep them proportional with the original image.

For some images you will want to upload a size larger than what will fit within the selected WordPress theme so that when the viewer clicks on it, then see a larger size.  Since I am making this post using version 2.51 of WordPress when I insert the image below, which is much wider than 450, and select to insert the full size, the WordPress editor automatically set the size for me with a witdh of 499 so  I don’t need to manually change it.  When someone clicks on the image, they can view the real full size.