Featuring Featured Images

In the WordPress Beginning there was a post and pretty much it was title, text, an author, a category/tag, a permalink, and that was it.

It’s hard to imagine blogs or news style web sites anymore that do not have an icon image that represents it, that plays a prominent display role as a banner, an og:image opengraph tag that indicates what image to use when shared in other media.

I’ve been using them long in this blog, but not always. And in the spirit of image attribution that has been an old dog track around here or as hardly anyone sez ABA Always Be Attributing.

Blog Theme Archeology

In writing my posts this month (note again how out of the box, old creaky out of fashion WordPress automatically provides easy to render archive links by date), doing ABA for featured images, I noted ot took maybe 17, 18 years to get into what I think is the idea image attribution method.

To dig back, though, I wanted to review the arc of my blog themes, to see how the use of images had changed with the periodic or now infrequent episodic blog theme jump. I swore I had a post or page documenting this, its mostly listed I note now in my colo-thing.

Thankfully there is the ever so usefult Internet Archive Wayback Machine, so I bopped around to find not the exact dates of theme changes, but at least representative snapshots of the changes over time.

Jump out now to go like some cat pictures as I do a bit of blog navel gazing. It’s my blog I get to make all the rules.

The Paleolithc Years: 2003-2005, Stock Default Kubrick

April 6, 2005: There was not much choosing in themes when I migrated from Movable Type to WordPress 1.5, it was the default Kubrik. I kepy mine really plain, not even the blue header. It’s posts all text, about the length of a long Mastodon toot, and sidebars of stuff. This example is from May 6, 2005.

A Notch Above Default, in a HeadSpace, Late 2005

Nov 11, 2005: I guess it did not take long to spiff it up, just slightly with a move to HeadSpace, a modification of Kubrick theme by someone name Fernando Graphicos. I at least have the cog and the dog and the blah blah blog visual going in the header. Here’s how it had advanced by March 6 2006.

I do have to note at least a fun image (gulp not attributed and not really legal) in a post announcing this major change (hah) on Nov 11, 2005

Busting Out the HoPE, Flickr in the Header and More End of 2009

Dec 26, 2009. Now it’s looking a bit more than text! I made a jump to a theme called HoPE by someone named Patrick. The big selling point was the top right panel in the. header that featured a dynamic updated lates image from my photos in flickr.

I found a reference that Featured Images, or technically Post Thumbnails were added to WordPress version 2.9 (yup clocked it as December 18, 2009). Did this compel me to start using a more visually appealing template? I also liked the overlay of the menu on the same blog header image, just cropped on the left. It looked more modern than the plan horizontal menu bar. I see I was still making fun of the high falutin “Colophone” word.

As this Wayback link from February 2010 shows I am at least attributing images. Still I did not make the image a featured image, so it was still not in my practice, more just trying a common form to start with an image, even if it was not a Featured Image I was featuring and image (see the post as it stands in 2025 how many have teen aged blog posts still hanging around the house with you?)

I am pretty sure it was this theme change that sent Jim Groom on a long running whinging about how bad my theme was me who was not named takes this burning flametorch of words as only the Bava can spin as love. Right, jim?

I’ll have you know that unlike some who will not be named here, I’ve been themogamous with the K2 theme for WordPress for almost five years now. I remain devoted to my theme, and I am of the mindset that a blog’s theme is a contract with your readers, a deep and sacred aesthetic relationship that should not be altered under any circumstances. Far too many people switch themes as if it were just a container for their ideas rather than an integral and constitutive part of the ideas themselves, and it’s my firm contention that the thematic promiscuity that is rampant on the web right now is an underlying factor in the decline of the fabric of the blogosphere more generally. There are no loyalties, the thoughtless hopping from theme to theme has escalated in recent years to a mindless jumping from service to service, and soon enough the web becomes a sordid orgy of half-assed apps and orphaned content, a broken platform lacking any sense of consistency and persistence. Well, the bava knows that, and as an antidote to the general moral malaise that abounds online currently, we’ve done our best to give everyone who comes home through its always open doors exactly what they expect, a clean, well-lighted theme that understands memories are made in space over time, and that the persistence and consistency of that space over time is paramount in making this world more than virtual.

https://bavatuesdays.com/the-bava-headers/

Ah those were the days when comments were a real party. Jim and I carried on this jam for a long time, and whole he did ditch his beloved K2 theme, he has been true to his word now in Twenty Twenty Five still rocking the Twenty Ten Theme.

Full on Featured Time with Welite, 2014

Nov 18, 2014. I was on a cycle of a new theme every five years, indeed my blog as “just a container for their ideas rather than an integral and constitutive part of the ideas themselves” and set myself up with a theme called Welite that was my first to make full use of Featured images to represent the posts on the front page and archives.

If I remember right, Welite had something built in that turned the first image used in a post to the featured theme, so it meant the blog style was to open the post with the image (and attribution). Here is how it look Wayback to April 2015.

But maybe I am wrong about that leading with an image. That post on April 5, 2015, a snarkless nod to Jim Groom, referencing a CD I spotted on a highway drive across Nevada, has the photo designated as a featured image. I had started attributing at the bottom of the post, under an html <hr> tag:

Covering the Last Theme Change

Aug 7, 2017. That Welite theme had a less than three year shelf life, and maybe I was getting as fickle and change prone as the Bava pronounced. It was a “premium” theme meaning I had shelled some $ for it, meaning too it came with its own mini operating system inside the blog. I recall I had some tech issues its developer never responded to.

Regardless, that was the last time I changed themes, now going in 8+ years in a move to the current theme in use, one called Cover (the only one so far that the original link still works). It’s still listed in the WordPress Theme directory, not updated since 2017, and according to the stats, is used on “50+” blogs. Regardless, it has been stable, and I have not really had the compulsion to change the look. The closest date in the WayBack is August 21, the change post still on the front page.

Well I have fiddle with it, as nearly all of the themes I have used I always went the route of setting up as a WordPress child theme, meaning I could tinker with things to modify the theme, but never edit the original (so it could be updated). Even looking at that archived version I can see I expanded the size of the header to fill the first view. It looks like I used the carousel feature of the header to display posts I tagged “featured”.

In that first month I changed it to what I use now, a set up done by posts I tagged “marquee” that are my various external reference sites, flickr photos, github code, which are not even blog posts- they are empty and use the Featured Image only to provide the ones that appear in the blog. Each uses a plugin to redirects to an external site.

Well who needs to know that? It’s all inside wordpressball. Hey, that thing about this being my blog/rules?

I did put the them to use on several projects, the home of the Networked Narratives course I co-taught several rounds with Mia Zamora. That link works cause I manage the domain/hosting. I also used it for the prototype site made for the Creative Commons Certificate (Wayback link) project I worked in in 2016-2017 and also the eCampusOntario Extend Domains of Our Own project. More or less WordPressThemeDogFooding?

Anyhow, lookie Jimmy, I have finally stopped theme changing!

But this meant every post used a Featured Image, still in 2018 I was mentioning/attributing the image in the footer but by 2019 I was at least embedding the photo used using my flickr cc attribution helper if thats where the image came from. This meant I would download the image to put in as a featured image, but the attribution embedded directly from flickr.

This meant for some featured images from other flikr users, if they deleted their image, the embed would be broken. Pretty minor issue, but at least by the start of 2024 I had finally gotten my currently feature feature image method. I always download my own version and add as a featured image in wordpress. For that poopy themed post, at the bottom I have my attribution text, which also includes any modifications I made, sometimes a bit of description how I found an image, occasionally some snarky remark about attribution. There’s always a place to add a story.

When I get down to writing the attribution, I can then just use the image block to insert the featured image, which is already in my WordPress media library. I had never noticed this option, as maybe I had been using the link to image file option, but now make use of the option that puts in a “lightbox” (the web page overlay you can close with a click).

Instead of the attribution in te image caption, it precedes it in my bloggy narrative.

My lightbox is dull, maybe I can figure out how to give it a black background instead of white.

Hey I figured it out in the middle of this post, just add a bit of CSS:

.wp-lightbox-overlay .scrim {background-color:#000 !important}
.wp-lightbox-overlay .close-button {background-color:#fff !important}

I blog this plane as I fly.

Anyone Still Reading this Post? Bueller? Bueller?

I thought this was just a little effort to document my image attribution approach, and instead I went on a Wayback machine rabbot hole filling in and digging up my own blog history. Shrug. In it I also had my own fun remembering the blog theme smack talk with Jim Groom.

There’s nothing more rewarding these days than writing stuff nobody but me is interested in. Again, the first rule of Blog Club?

Regardless, now you know more than anyone should care about what comes at the tail of this post.

Bye!

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Featured Image: Open Hatches on The Green Roof flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) As often my first resort, I searched my own flickr photos for something with “feature” in it. Nothing literally worked, but this photo from a series I took in 2008 of the roof at the California Academy of Sciences (see a better shot of roof) worked as something like a visual array of images. Or so I told my heard that. Here comes the image in a lightbox, now with the black background I hacked in the middle of writing this post.