I did hope that we could have a year of very little change by WordPress for us struggling bloggers; but they have done it !! with a change to the Reader format.
It is so good that I cannot understand why after all the years learning the subtle art of composition, I didn’t think of cropping all my images into letterbox format. It is such a brilliant idea that I am now going to mask all my lenses to this format so I can save myself even more time & trouble.
David A Lockwood 
A lot of this is going over my head. In general I have been happy with WP, but I’ve always found the Reader clunky. When I see something I want to dive into, it seems like it takes me two or three clicks to get there, with several newly opened tabs.
I am mainly interested in getting better at photography and photojournalism, and I want a simple way to post that content in a very clean format. I’m not a luddite, I enjoy some of the tech tinkering, but I am not interested in that being the focus of my efforts.
Unfortunately these days it seems that software writers & application developers live in a world of their own. They assume most people will think what they do is marvelous: think Windows 8 or vista.
It is not going to change, I can remember the same attitude back in the 1960’s & 70’s, we mere mortals must just put up with it.
The drive towards letterbox aspect has to do with the technology of rendering images quickly. The trend is towards full-width images and if interspersed with text the viewer will hold a tablet/phone landscape-wise (all other devices are landscape only). This means a portrait aspect image will be partly or wholly off the screen, and very large, which is makes it doubly difficult to render quickly, progressively, smoothly. There are ways (non-geeky, too!) to address this, but not within the straight-jacket of WordPress Reader. The problem is not one of full WordPress software – just the WordPress app, which is very very limited in functionality, and an abonimation to aesthetic sensibility!
First of all, thanks for the visit.
I have thought for a while that I should move to ‘self hosting’ with WordPress.org or some such host, but it seemed a little bit like hard work. After all the changes in the last few years, maybe I should get a Grip!!!
The Reader has been ruined for photographers and as you indicate, is not going to get better. A pity because I liked using it in its previous interation. Ho well; the more I see of what is called progress, the more it complicates matters. In my job I use a lot of electronic test equipment and that has become a real challenge, getting a reading was easy in the past, now it’s pages & menus & digital displays that sometimes are not fast enough for the information I need.
Sorry for the rant: last time I got fed up with WP I promised myself the Nikon F just to go back to basics. Did & it’s been fun, but this time I think I will just buy some film & stick my head in the sand 😉
Had a quick look at your site and it looked very interesting, when I am on a better Internet provider, will enjoy browsing it I am sure.
Self-hosting a WordPress site frees you from black-box dumbed-down technology.
And I notice the “More on WORDPRESS.COM” links to other posts now sport a vertical rectangular image crop! My phone can show a dynamically resized full image!
That is the problem for them I think, mobile devices (Window 8 comes to mind) large monitor static computers are used in a totally different way.
David.
I also voiced my concern to WP. I can’t find anything useful in the Reader anymore.
I agree, it was primarily an aide-mémoire for sites I liked but often I would see something else that caught my interest – not now.
I made my feeling known, I expect we will be ignored for the greater good 😈
David.
You’re not the only one pissed off, David 😦
I was reading about it on another blog and discovered every commenter on that particular blog was not happy either.
WordPress and being fair, some other photography site are doing the same. All for mobile devices I’m sure.
If they wanted to save space a thumbnail image would have been better than arbitrarily cropping.
David.
😄