the chutry experiment

You must become a Firefox user. There's no use in fighting it.

I'll take your comment as a sign that everything is readable. I'll become a Firefox user when I get a faster modem connection, which will hopefully happen fairly soon.

Wow! Blog is legible! Thanks!

I use Firefox on Mac OS X. Your blog was legible before, and it's still legible now.

By the way, I created a banner for you in Photoshop and uploaded it to the 'herder server.

If you want to use it, the code would be as follows

/img alt="thechutryexperiment.gif" src="http://www.wordherders.net/wordherders/thechutryexperiment.gif" width="650" height="133" / /

only with the appropriate "greater than" and "lesser than" brackets on either end. You'll have to replace the "banner" div in your templates.

I'd be glad to revise it for you, if you'd like it to be in a different font, different color, etc...

It was readable both ways, but I do think I like the minimalist approach better.

You cannot resist the dialectic. It's less than a five megabyte download. You can do that over a 56K modem five to ten minutes.

As an example, I'm going to open up a hex editor, call a friend and have him read the 0s and 1s to me over the phone to see how it long it takes. I'm guessing about thirty minutes.

I know I'm getting old, but this font is way too small for comfort... and I'm not fond of black on stark white either. In fact, I think this could give me a headache very quickly. You did ask...

And you have to get Firefox. It's cool. Let it download while you're surfing around.

Sharon, I was curious about the font size. I'll try to make it a little larger. I've thought about using something off-white but haven't found any satisfying options just yet.

Thanks for the input.

On Moz 1.7.5 at home, everything looked fine. Using 1.7.3 with my laptop away, there's this horrible gray-on-gray that's more or less impossible to read.

Jonathan, that's really weird. Does anyone have any suggestions? As some of you may have noticed, I've now become indecisive about the font, too. I like the x-small version of Arial, but I know it was difficult to read. Of course, playing with my blog's appearance is a distraction from other work I really should be doing.

G, I like the new banner and will add it at some point.

The only web tool for background/text colour you will ever need: http://www.ficml.org/jemimap/style/color/wheel.html

This font size is much more comfortable (but you're right, it does look different).

Everything looks fine to me. I've tried it in Mozilla Firefox on Windows and Linux, the Mozilla Browser (nightly build), Internet Explorer, and Opera on Linux.

Text-size weirdness in Internet Explorer and Mozilla is often due to the fact that people rescale the font sizes for whatever reason. For example, in IE, some people choose to set the text size to "Smallest" under the View menu. There isn't much one can do about this except to set fixed pixel fonts. And even then, some people don't think that's a good idea.

Fonts are not an easy problem.

We should start a running count of how many times Chuck writes "playing with my blog's X is a distraction from other work I really should be doing." Mine is at three so far, but I could be wrong.

Yes, I'm sure I sound like a broken record. Breaks from teaching often leave me feeling a little bit lost. My sense of routine is completely gone. I find myself staying up until 3:30 in the morning. It's all very confusing....