The Staff of Prophecy

And the angel said unto Bookstooge, “Take up thy staff, for with it ye shall smite the nations, shattering them until the reforging shall appear.”

And Bookstooge replied “My lord, what shall I say? For thou knowest I am but a man of few words.”

“I shall give thee a scroll, a scroll of doom. From it shalt thou read, day and night, excoriating the nations for not making thee king of the world” was the angel’s answer.

“Furthermore, I shall make thee strong as a tree. Deep roots feeding thee, body hard as steel, impervious to all their outrageous slings and arrows. Fortune wilt be thine!”

“And this shall be the sign twixt me and thee. I will turn this maple tree purple, for such a thing has never been seen in the land before, nor shall it be seen again. Thus I have spoken, thus it shall be!” And the angel vanished without a trace.

The Prophet Bookstooge took up his Staff of Prophecy, and from that day onward, even unto the everlasting future, he swatted all the little boys and girls who ever dared to set foot on his lawn. And peace reigned across the land.

♪Like A True Nature's Child♪

Because there is nothing more precious than an all natural Bookstooge holding his all natural rockstar baby. Just as Nature Intended, awwwwwwww. (you can tell everything is all natural because of the trees in the background)

Wintermint Dumpstagramm - Double the Fun

♪Double your pleasure♪
♪Double your fun♪
♪Double your dumpstas♪
♪Now you’re done!♪

Need More Space? Bookstooge Has You Covered Part II

Two years ago I wrote a post (Part I) detailing how to utilize Dropbox as a picture hosting site so you didn’t have to eat into your free space here at WordPress. I’ve been using it on any picture over 100KB and it seems to work well for me. But just because something is working well doesn’t mean I am content to sit on my lees and let WordPress continue to work against me behind my back. It would be just like them at some point to disallow outside hosted pictures on free sites, so I decided to investigate what I could do for picture compression. Just in case you can’t tell, I have an extremely adversarial relationship with WP.com.

What I found was the Caesium Image Compressor. Here is the website and the download for various OS’s is part way down the page: Caesium Website.

I have been very pleased so far. Once I installed it, it took a while of playing around to get all the various options set up how I wanted. What I didn’t realize, and was very pleasantly surprised with, is that Caesium can also resize your photos along with compressing them. This is wonderful for me as I use the high quality pictures from my Calibre Library for my book reviews. Instead of having to use a separate resizer tool and then Caesium to compress that, I can do it all in one step. I even have it save the picture where I want so everything is conveniently stored for upload.

I use it on the little pictures for the book reviews (which are 194px wide) and I regularly get 30-60% compression. Going from 30KB down to 18KB isn’t a world breaking but if I want to continue blogging for years and years, every little bit adds up. I also use Caesium on any files I upload to Dropbox as well. Saving space any way I can means I don’t have to worry about hitting that 3gb limit (or 1gb if you’re a poor new user to WordPress. You newbs really have my sympathies in that regards!) It is another step in the blogging process however. So you have to decide if that is worth it to you or not. For me, it totally is. It is free, it is small and once you set it up to your taste, it is almost just 3 clicks of the mouse and you’re done.

I hope this post has been helpful even if just to inform you of options that you have. Because knowing is half the battle!

GI Bookstooge is the REAL American Hero, but we all knew that anyway