— Friday’s Blogathon between Instapundit and VodkaPundit was disappointing. The judges had to disqualify Instant for junk posting, noting:3 posts on spam (one on phone-spam, of all things), 3 vanity posts on mentions from other sites,2 posts from the British press on American subjects not pertaining to Italian food,6 posts on the infiltration of the … Continue reading “Daily Meta-Blog”
— Friday’s Blogathon between Instapundit and VodkaPundit was disappointing. The judges had to disqualify Instant for junk posting, noting:
3 posts on spam (one on phone-spam, of all things),
3 vanity posts on mentions from other sites,
2 posts from the British press on American subjects not pertaining to Italian food,
6 posts on the infiltration of the musical community by Capitalists (a “Sullivan,” which is 5 or more posts on a topic of no significance), and
2 additional Ken Layne references.
The judges want the boys to play hard, but to play fair, so they urge them not to let this happen again. Meanwhile, Vodka has a real ISP, and has survived a trip to the dentist. Only losers blog on weekends, so the competition will resume Monday.
On a related note, the trend of bloggers toward professional web site designer makeovers is disturbing. Professionally-done sites tend to highlight the designer’s own visual creativity, and typically result in the site’s text being harder to read. This is not going in the right direction. Whether you’re buying a makeover or doing your own, bear in mind that rule number one in good Blog aesthetics is to maintain high legibility for your musings. This means fonts that are workmanlike and large enough to read, and high contrast between text and background.
The default templates for Blogger and Movable Type both have design bugs with respect to fonts, specifying their size in pixels rather than the relative units (medium, small, or x-small) that are adjusted by the Browser’s View Text control. The pixel is not a unit of uniform size, since video display systems vary from 72 Pixels per inch all the way up to 144. So a 10-pixel font that may look fine on a medium-quality display shrinks to half the size you think it has when viewed on a professional-quality, high-resolution video card with a large screen. Movable Type also specifies line-height, an unnecessary thing that also interferes with user adjustment of font sizes.
It’s surprising that this design bug is so prevalent, but no more so than the lack of reliability on the Blogspot server. When the Professor moves to his ISP, I expect that Blogspot will improve however, since he probably accounts for half their traffic, if not more. Humble sites like this one entertain 1000 unique visitors a day, but the Prof has to be knocking down 10 times that many, if not more.
