Blog Design

[fern hill]

I'm pretty new to the blogosphere. I want to know -- who the hell designed the blog template with the centred copy that many people are using? It's illegible. It's like trying to read a two-page wedding invitation. It sux big time. I was just at Judy Rebick's blog http://judyrebick.blogspot.com/ to read about the cuts to Status of Women and she's using it too!!! Screw her.

I'm starting a personal boycott of all blogs with centred copy.

[pogge]

I think that's one of the standard Blogger templates with no customization. By "centred" I'm assuming you mean the whole design is centred with a fixed width 'cos the copy itself is left-justified. If you changed your video resolution to 800 x 600 I bet you'd find that it's designed to just fit in a full browser window with no sidescroll. And it's likely a table based design with the column widths fixed in pixels rather than percentages.

It wouldn't take much to at least change the main column to float. I know that because that's what I did with ours (which I'm beginning to think is due for an overhaul, but who has time?).

[fern hill]

pogge, by centred I mean centred. It is not left-justified. It is ragged left and right. It looks like an invitation. pogge.ca is lovely and airy. I don't think it needs changing.

[Herr Magoo]

I tell students that there are only two valid reasons for centring like that:  fancy wedding invitations, and fancy restaurant menus.  If you look at either, and squint, it's like a Rorschach Ink Blot Test.

What's more, it's difficult to read.  When your eye gets to the end of a line it has to do a little "carriage return/line feed" operation where it moves down to the next line and back to its beginning.  With a strong left margin, your eye knows exactly where to go to.  With ragged left, it has to figure it out for each line.

Sadly, to the uninformed, such abominations as script fonts, full centring, and "misused" "quotation" "marks" mean important, fancy and elegant.

That said, I LIKE when blogs or websites centre a table in the middle to restrict line length.  Maybe that's my 20" high-res monitor speaking, but I don't like reading as though I'm watching a tennis match.  Hard on the neck.  :)


ed'd to add:  I'm looking at Judy's blog, and it's left justified.  (??)

[fern hill]

Oy, when 'desk-top publishing' first hit, the graphic design crimes that were committed! People wanted to use every font and style in the same piece. I called that 'ransom note' style, like words cut out of different parts of a newspaper and pasted together.

Edited to add: pogge, you still here? I want to ask, how is pogge pronounced?


Edited again to add: I went and looked at Judy's blog and it is not left-justified. It's centred.  :?:

[Herr Magoo]

Strange.  Here's my view:



Pardon the verticality.  I have my monitor set to portrait, for the fun of it.

[kuri]

I haven't encountered that one too much. What bugs me is anything that slows loading. For example, I find Eugene Plawiuks' Le Revue Gauche really interesting. He has a talent for choosing topics that I want to read. But I always regret clicking through to his posts on my blog aggregater. Why? He has, like 300 or so sidebar gadgets and his blog temporarily kills my firefox. (If I make the mistake of opening something on my PDA… fuggetaboutit!)

I'm really wary of anything I add that is any bigger than a 80 x 15 .gif for that reason.

[fern hill]

Well, that's just plain weird. What you've got there Magoo looks nothing like what I see, not the colours or anything.

[Herr Magoo]

Odder still.  I'm using the link you provided.  I checked it in FF, to see if it's maybe some kind of CSS issue or something, but it's the same:  maroon banner, background in grey, left justified.

---

Okay, I downloaded her main page, hosed out the inline CSS, and it still displays left justified.  Sometimes you'll see situations where there's some source formatting that gets overridden by the style sheet, but if the style sheet won't load, the source formatting takes over.  This isn't one of those times.

Occams razor suggests that maybe you've eaten wheat that's been infested with Ergot, and now you're hallucinating?  How many thumbs am I holding up?  Do you see three?

[fern hill]

What I get has a medium blue band across the top, with an orangey B in a box and the word 'blogger' at the top. Next blog buttons and so on. Text is centred black on white. I'm using IE on a mac. No ergot here.

[Debra]

My view is essentially the same as Magoo's. Maybe it's the Mac.  

[lagatta]

I'm using Safari on a PowerMac, and Judy's text is unjustified, but with a normal left edge and ragged right (like typewriting, and most e-mail messages). Very easy to read.

[pogge]

Oy, when 'desk-top publishing' first hit, the graphic design crimes that were committed!

I was in the printing industry at the time and I concur. Suddenly everyone thought he was a designer just because he could do it on the cheap.

Edited to add: pogge, you still here? I want to ask, how is pogge pronounced?

Rhymes with soggy.

Edited again to add: I went and looked at Judy's blog and it is not left-justified. It's centred.  :?:

I've checked it in Firefox, IE and Opera and I get what Magoo sees: flush left, ragged right. When I look at the source, it gets stranger still:

body {
  background:#ccc;
  margin:0;
  padding:20px 10px;
  text-align:center;
  font:x-small/1.5em "Trebuchet MS",Verdana,Arial,Sans-serif;
  color:#333;
  font-size/* */:/**/small;
  font-size: /**/small;
  }

I should think "text-align:center;" would result in what you're seeing, not what the rest of us are seeing. And it would drive me nuts, too.

ETA:
Edited 'cos I'm supposed to know what this stuff means.

[link here]

It's a pre-OS X problem, i think.

On my computers:

windows XP = the good version
OS X = the good version
OS 9.2 = the ugly centred version

Because of similar display phenomena (for example, boxes, either text or images, that should be sidebars, overlapping the main column of text; on some sites, particularly news sites, like yahoo, having to scroll down, and often over, through much white space before finding the text), i've assumed it's the way IE running on pre-OS X is interpreting the CSS.

[fern hill]

I changed the title so as not to offend.

I'm finding Progressive Bloggers difficult to navigate. And it may be my browser (again), but why the long strings of single words on a line?