ronbailey says:

pretty cool - looks good with Firefox/XP…

Miranda says:

Good news, your RSS feed still works…
Like the new logo.

Gnomic says:

I’m still getting a feel for it and am withholding judgement for the moment. I am noticing issues with font rendering on IE 6.0 (but it could just be me - more testing to follow). Fonts are being clipped and entire lines of text are missing, but mostly reappear upon scrolling.

Gnomic says:

I like the overall new look, especially the inverse heading anchors, but have the following recommendations:

- Change your fonts to san sarif for consistancy and readability. Presently there is an inconsistant font mix. San Sarif fonts are easier to read.
- Move the blog index back to the left. Its buried in the middle of the page, which is inconsistant with most usability paradigms. Indexes are generally presented on an edge.
- Consider frameing the blog index with a boarder.
- Move the “add your comments” to the left or more the permalink to the left for better click seperation. Consider making the add comment a button or invert it in order to make it visually stand out from comment text.
- Make the anchor headings match the font your name is presented in.
-move all the icons (wordpress, notepad) to the bottom of the page.
- my font size issue seems to have something to do with using large font size settings on my browser and the site using DHTML to size the text blocks - its not scaling correctly.

Just thoughts off the top of my head.

tommy says:

i disagree with the general point that sans-serif fonts are easier to read. At smaller sizes serif fonts ARE harder to read, but technically when rendered at a reasonable size serif fonts are known to be easier for the human eye to read.

that said, i DO agree that a sans-serif font would be nicer to look at here. i prefer sans-serif fonts for online content, but if i had my way, it would all be courier…

:-)

Andrew says:

Interesting, the serif vs sans-serif. Here’s my thinking:

In print, the “rule” was sans-serif heds, serif body. But on screen it’s reversed because sans-serif are usually easier to read. The site had a sans-serif body for a long time.

I looked at a lot of sites, though, and found that I liked a serif body face, too, so I thought I’d try it for a bit.

I’m tending toward the sans-serif camp, though.

Also: Eric wrote to tell me he thought the home page was too crowded — that everything had an equal emphasis. Agree? Disagree?

I guess it’s gonna be another late night….

Gnomic says:

It does seem a bit crowded, but I thought you were going for that newspaperish look.

A definitive study on font readability: http://www.alexpoole.info/academic/literaturereview.html

greyrat says:

Fonts | clip | ped | off | fix, | k | th | x

Using WinXP with IE 6… I’ll check it on Firefox someday.

Andrew says:

I’m viewing it in IE7 now, and I checked it in IE6, both with XP. I don’t see clipping. Hmm. I will continue to investigate.

ronbailey says:

looks good in Opera on XP as well.

I wouldn’t concern myself with IE - let ‘em get a real browser - http://getfirefox.com

Gnomic says:

Ron,

Reality Check here. Like it or not, most users used IE. While I like Opera and Flock, I doubt if my love of Andrew’s blog is going to convince my company from changing its browser standard. And for personal users - I doubt if first time IE viewers are going to get past a crappy looking site and switch browers.

Perhaps a better course of action is to find the problem and fix it.

Its software people, not a religion. Unless you want to worship a buggy god…

Gnomic says:

Andrew,

I think you ought to keep the 3 column format
1st column, indexes, archives, etc. (narrow)
2nd column, comments (wide)
3rd column, ads, stuff from other sites, etc. (narrow)

Then on comment pages, columns 1 and 2 become the comment area, column 3 remains for ads, etc.

This would give the site some visual stability. Right now it doesn’t seem consistant page-to-page.

Gnomic says:

OH - and keep the top banner consistant. on the front site its your name - quote - goofy image and on the comment pages its badly formatted date, then your name. Be consistant and block static and dynamic information in the same visual blocks (areas).

Andrew says:

Badly formatted date? What’s so bad about it? (It’s not always the date, btw — it depends on what page you’re looking at.)

Andrew says:

As for the three-column format, I did some interesting reading on Web-site usability. It seems that people read sites like an “F” — across the top, then down the left side. Only then do they go down the middle and right.

Ergo, I put the main stuff on the left, but the other important stuff (recent comments) up top as well.

gnomic says:

The date wraps - hence badly formatted. I l;iked it better in the grey bar under the header.

Now the date box size doesn’t match the size of the site name box. Ugh. And there are ads on both sides of the page. AGH!

Consistancy Andrew, Consistancy. All the boxes should be consistant in size and placement. And similar types of things should always be in the same place.

I like the ads being a seperate color - but keep them all on one side or the other.

The font clipping seems to have gone away.