Badtux the Snarky Penguin

In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.

Religious fundamentalists are motivated by the sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Rant of the day: Teensy columns and fonts

Okay, blogging dudes and dudettes. WTF is this nonsense about, like, making your blog into ONE TINY LITTLE COLUMN in the middle of the vast real estate of the browser window? That's, like, so 1999 dot-com BS.

Then there's the nonsense about changing your font to the teensiest, tiny little font around to try to fit enough prose into that teensy little column so that your blog page isn't five million miles long. Hello? Some of us don't have 20 year old eyeballs anymore, y'know?

Then there are the guys who fuck with their Blogger header so that you can never, ever get back to the main page if you somehow followed a link in to a sub-page of their site. Hello? It's called *navigation*, dumbasses!

Look at my blog. I use all the screen real-estate, and I don't fuck with your fonts. And you can always get back to the main page by clicking on the blog name at the top of the page. Yeah, it ain't fancy. I use plain old vintage 1997 table tags in my template, don't have a graphic behind my text, don't use layers, and otherwise don't do anything high-tech. But you can read the shit. And that's the point, right?

Some folks just like being purdy more than they like bein' read. Just sayin', y'know??

- Badtux the Bleary-eyed Penguin

Posted by: BadTux / 1/24/2006 12:20:00 AM

Comments:

I'm sorry. I use a Mac and have minimum fonts set in FF so I don't know if my fonts are too small on my page. Windoze seems to render fonts differently per OS.

What size font would you suggest? I believe I have a dynamic template that is supposed to adjust to the size if the screen.
# posted by Debra : 24/1/06 7:07 AM

Look! A Google just for snarky penguins. http://www.google.com/linux
# posted by niCk (Mem Beth) : 24/1/06 7:33 AM

Hey, what if your stuff looks great in one browser but like crap in another? That really peeves me because that is what my site looks like.

If I put the fonts to look normal in Firefox they are huge in windows.

I need a web designer, I do not have time for all of that!

;-)
# posted by Ole Blue The Heretic : 24/1/06 7:47 AM

I like the design of my blog just fine, thank you very much.

*phhppfffphtt*
# posted by Lab Kat : 24/1/06 8:48 AM

Okay, Deb, yours looks fine. Yes, it does expand to fill the screen. If you want to see an example of one that does not... ick!

Blue, I feel your pain. I had the same issues with the stock Blogger template you're using until I said "f*** this s***" and re-wrote the template from scratch to get rid of all that fancy-pants dot-com BS and go back to Web 101, which I want to eventually make purdy but in the meantime it's readable so WTF? What especially ticks me off about most of the stock Blogger templates is that they don't resize to fit the screen. Typical dot-com BS. The dot-commers were all about purdy and f*** readability...

- Badtux the HTML Penguin
# posted by BadTux : 24/1/06 8:53 AM

I hear you about the teensy tiny fonts! there is one thing you can do on the fly - hold down CTRL key & hit + sign couple of times, it increases the size of the font in the active window.

My pet peeve is the one where they have the active window down the middle, and it disappears(or goes down to one word across) when you make a smaller size window. Hard to hide behind your other stuff at work if it has to be all the way across *snicker* *snicker*
# posted by SB Gypsy : 24/1/06 9:00 AM

Guilty as charged. I guess I hadn't noticed..my twenty-year-old eyes can read it just fine.
My beef is with the web logs that have more sidebar content than actual posts. Not only do they take ages to load, but what's the point in having two sidebars and five blog rolls?
# posted by marie antoinette : 24/1/06 11:44 AM

Sounds like someone got hold of some bad herring this morning.

Guilty as charged. I'm kind of happy with mine the way it is now, but you make good points. I've done sites both ways. Both have their own problems. I never stay happy with one for too long, so maybe next time I'll look for a good template that's stretchy.
# posted by zenyenta : 24/1/06 7:27 PM

Honor Roll

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"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce." -- Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

-- Plato

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