Upgrades

Opps. Sorry. Sorry. Sometimes I just get a little carried away.

Still…Green Stamps? Wouldn't a real American invent something like Red, White, and Blue Stamps?

Forget it. I really don't see the point of Green Stamps anyway now that we have Bitcoin. I find them great to add a little ballast to my boat.

I came in just now, and the Recent Threads sidebar was absent. The Recent Posts was still there, and that's mainly what I use anyway, but I wanted to mention it.

Brad,

Here is another quote regarding the position actors held in society, which I thought you would enjoy

The best feature of the Roman stage was the acting. The leading part was usually played by the manager, a freeman; the other performers were mostly Greek slaves. Any citizen who became an actor forfeited his civic rights-a custom that lasted till Voltaire.

That is from Will Durant's "Caesar and Christ" the third volume in his "The History of Civilization.

It might interest you to know that this attitude to actors lasted well into the 20th century. A couple of years back, I saw an old Dick Cavett interview with Charlton Heston. Heston mentioned that one of the reasons he got involved with the civil rights moment was due to the way people were prejudiced against actors. He gave an example of such prejudice, which he had encountered in the 1950s when he was already a big star.

Apparently, he had booked a room in some high-class hotel in Madrid and when he arrived, he had to fill out a card giving his personal details. When the hotel clerk read that Heston wrote "actor" as his profession, the clerk was a bit unsettled and had to tell Heston that the hotel did not accept persons in Heston's profession as customers. 

I don't recall how the situation was resolved, but that should give you an idea of how deeply the distaste for the acting profession was across Europe and, to a lesser degree, the States.

Oh my word. What would Alyssa Milano do if she couldn't hector the rest of us 24/7 about how perfect she is and how we're all in error?

Note: I changed the style of quoted text. I thought the default gray box with a black border was boring and didn't stand out very well. I change the font to italic and indented it a bit as well. What do you all think?

I’m not sure about the blue, but what else is there?

Okay. Thanks for the feedback. I went a tad (smidgen?) less baby-blue.

Not a cause for jumping up and down or shooting confetti, but I increased the line spacing of posts. It was too tight. I’m trying to find a way to (now that I’ve increased line spacing) to tighten the spacing between paragraphs a little. To no avail. I’ve tried everything. Not a big deal. But if you look at an article at The American Spectator, you’ll notice their tighter paragraph spacing (and even looser line spacing). It doesn’t take much extra space between paragraphs to make it visually work. Their line spacing is generous as well (maybe a bit too much so)

Error #1 for nearly all forums is they keep to the default width which is to fill the entire width of the screen. That makes for difficult reading because your eye finishes one line and then has to travel all the way back to the left to pick up the next one.

Writing a treatise over “and/or” is probably the sign of obsessive-compulsiveness. But sweating details of type is what typographers do, and I am one of them.

You can see the design choices over at RedState. The width of the articles is even narrower than at Spectator (and I think read better for it….and it’s a better choice of typeface at RedState). Notice, too, the relative small space between paragraphs at RedState. To my eye (and this will depend a bit on the x-height of the typeface used), this is about perfect. I’d like R&T to match that. It’s a very small thing but I like sweating these details even if most other think that whatever comes out of their head by accident ought to be chiseled in stone. I’m open to improvement, suggestion, and a little criticism if need be. I don’t think the sun shines out of my ass.

Their quoting system at RedState is interesting as well. I had a plugin at ST that would give the same effect. It works for them as the red bar mirrors their site’s name. Otherwise, it’s a bit much. And I find that italic type is preferable in quotes, if only because “Reader Views” in mobile devices (at least for R&T articles) retain the italic type so that you can still visually see what the quote is. “Reader View” strips off so much of the formatting (as it should) that often articles loose the separation between the article and the quotes. It just all looks the same. Check out “Reader View” in your tablet with an article here that uses some quote blocks. You’ll see.

National Review Online does a pretty good job. They have wider columns of text but compensate (a little) with slightly larger line spacing. Other than the advertising crud they throw all over the screen that bogs down their site, it’s easy to read although I would make those columns slightly narrower.

American Thinker has nice typography, although why they have their entire articles flush-left to the screen is beyond me. And when you use “Reader View” in your tablet, the quote blocks are lost. They blend in with the text. And (at least on my iPad), in “Reader View” over 3/4 of the article goes missing. It cuts off after that first quoted block. That error has been there for ages. At R&T, “

The Blaze is a horrible mix of amateurishness — staring with the reversed-out headlines. Adding red to links is amateurish The gray of quoted blocks gives the impression that something hasn’t fully loaded yet. It’s just a junk-shot approach. It’s a mess.

If we look at a Fox News article, we see a pretty clean approach. And this is the first site of the bunch that uses a sans-serif typeface. It’s fine. It works. But serif faces are easier to read.

Limbaugh’s site is very “conservative” with its use of space — probably a bit too much so. Both line-spacing and paragraph spacing could be increased a little. This is only slightly bad design. We’ve already seen much worse.

Mark Steyn’s site, as you might suspect, gets the basics right although I question messing with the standard blue of links. Don’t unnecessarily confuse the user regarding whether those links have been visited or not. R&T’s blue links are standard but (as just noticed) do not go to that sort of light purples when the links have been visited. I’ll see if I can fix that.Reader View” doesn’t cut anything off and quoted blocks remain distinguished as such by the italics.

My thought exactly. And I've tried changing the color of "visited links" but every link is hardwired to one color. I can change that color (to black even, so that you couldn't even see that it was a link). But I can find no option that works for changing the color of visited links. There are some settings for visited links but they don't "take." That is, something else unseen is overriding whatever manual settings I try to apply.

I think you mean you don't want to have to mess with the scroll bar at the bottom. Me neither.

And having delved further into the matter, it would seem most sites (at least the ones I visited) don't mark a link in any way if it's been visited. American Thinker does, but offhand that's the only one I could find. The American Spectator does something interesting: It highlights links (which are in normal black) with an underline. A hover will cause the underline to disappear.

I don't mind a link standing out a little. Maybe the ones I have here are two blue and too in-your-face. But they leave no doubt that they are a clickable link. I suppose I could go old school an underline them. Assuming that I could. [Actually I was able do that and decided I don't like the underline and I don't mind the brighter blue — and the san-serif typeface — making those links stand out a little.]