Aaarrrrggghhhh!

Vertikles critiqued this blog the other day and said that it looked like it had been created twenty years ago by an eccentric crank. I wasted no time in quickly whipping off a reply castigating him for his lack of taste and his indiscerning eye for the stylish. Having quickly dispatched of the unwarranted commentary, I returned to contemplating my next post. In the back of my mind, I was still stewing about his e-mail. He kept calling it a 19 point font. Hah! That shows what he knows. All of the text is actually sixteen pixels high. Still, he did come back to that point three times and in all of the years that I've known Vertikles (a number that makes nineteen look very small), he is nearly always correct about these details.

So, to appease my indignation, I quickly searched the text for '19px' and son of a gun, there was one spot in the code where body text was set to nineteen pixels. To understand how this could occur, you must realize that Blogger templates are a mashup of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Google voodoo. Furthermore, I was using a Blogger template that I had extensively modified (the attribution is in the source code, but I made so many changes that I didn't think it fair to either party to have the author's name on the page) and which had been written by someone with what must be delicately called poor code hygiene. Somewhere along the line, a 16 had been changed to a 19. So I changed it back.

And by Crom, now the page looked terrible.

I knew that all of the sizes were right, but the smaller text swam in white on the black background. Vertikles had also railed against my use of Raleway as the body font, but I rather liked it. Except that in the small size, it was all but unreadable. The nuances that make it interesting blurred together into a gummy mass. To make bad matters worse, the little things that annoyed me that I hadn't gotten around to fixing, like the spacing on the cast and inventory lists in the movie reviews, were even more obvious with the smaller font size.

Aaaaarrrggghhh!

So, some twenty hours of my life later, it's much nicer, at least in my opinion (and Vertikles would be wise to keep his thoughts to himself for a few weeks). I've rolled back to an earlier color scheme, made some tweaks to links when you hover over them, fixed the Crom-damned list spacing, and even changed the text font. Vertikles will still be displeased, but I don't care. I can't stand text fonts where you can't tell a lowercase 'L' from an uppercase 'I' or the number '1'. I also like editorial typefaces to have a bit of character (sorry), with a few distinctive characters. I had almost gone to something really trendy, but my predilection for pompous verbosity meant that the resulting deluge of sesquipedalian prose would be even more unreadable unless I chose carefully. In the end, looking through the Google fonts, as well as those that I have a web license for, I chose Museo Sans, which is quirky enough for my taste, while still being readable in a paragraph of text.

In the next day or so, I'll get around to another Amazon posting. The little gnomes who make the suggestions have been working overtime there and I have bumper crop of artificial stupidity to spring upon you. Until then, Tschüß.