if you build it.....

we have been seeing tree swallows for several days. they flit about looking for food and, we're guessing, nesting places. i googled "tree swallow nest" and found nice plans here. so i built it. tree swallows, i am informed by shaw creek bird supply along with the nice plans, prefer dead trees near water. we don't have any dead trees, as such, but we do have some alder tops that i trimmed. i planted one near our pond and hung up mr. and mrs. tree swallow's new digs.

geek notes: if you clicked on the picture to get a bigger version you may have noticed --go, try-- that the large picture is slightly different than the picture on the post. the larger picture is the original (birdhouse.jpg). i cropped it and made its density and therefore file size much lower in photoshop. then i uploaded both pictures to blogger and modified the html code so the smaller picture (birdhouse1.jpg) loads with the post (faster loading) and the larger picture loads when the post picture is clicked upon. the idea is that our blog page will load faster for those of you on dialup, and everyone has the choice to look at a bigger picture.

below is the original html coding produced by blogger when i uploaded a picture named "birdhouse1.jpg" blogger doesn't make colored text. i did that for demonstration purposes.

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/166/973/1600
/birdhouse1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/166/973/400/birdhouse1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>

the file name referenced in red (birdhouse1.jpg) is the name of the image you get when you click on the picture in the post. the file name highlighted in blue is the name of the picture file that goes with the post. as you can see, the file names are the same.

below is the altered code that is behind the picture at the top of this post. the only change from the code above is the red file name. ok. i could have named one file "this" and the other "that" and the whole thing could have been more obvious, i suppose.

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/166/973/1600
/birdhouse.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/166/973/400/birdhouse1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>

so now the first reference is to birdhouse.jpg and the second to birdhouse1.jpg.

some of you may wonder why you're seeing html code as text. how does he do that? why doesn't my browser just give me a picture? how am i seeing the html control characters < and >?

i type the four characters & l t ; without spaces and you see <

i type the four characters & g t ; without spaces and you see >

the click on the picture thing can summon up any url. click on the picture below.