Fonts de Leon
Submitted by Sarah D. Bunting on April 10, 2007 – 10:10 PM19 Comments
You know that scene in Field of Dreams when Busfield looks around and goes, “When did all these baseball players get here?” That’s kind of how I’m feeling about the font on TN right now. Seriously — wasn’t it a nice legible sans-serif last week? Am I crazy?
I think it’s because I cut and pasted today’s Vine from MS Word; I’m going to do a test and try to figure it out. I’m sorry everything is so serif-y (or bold, or taggy, or otherwise horky) around here. I’m working on it.
(Oh, and reader who commented on the font: thanks for the heads-up, but I deleted the comment by mistake, because I don’t know how to work the internet. Sorry about that!)
ETA: I think it’s fixed now. That’ll learn me to cut and paste.
Share!
Tags: about
I’m wondering if you’re ever going to go back to the ‘essays on the front page, updated every monday’ and ‘Vine over there’, and ‘blog over there’ format. Now it’s like everything is of equal importance, and instead of averaging the value of each area, it’s dragging everything down to the lowest level.
I’ve taken some time to get to know the new layout, and I still don’t like it. Your essays deserved pride of place on the Home Page. Vine(s) and their responses had their space, as did casual commentary. Now they’re all mashed potatoes. Glop.
Besides, I miss the pictures and the ‘At Left’ snarky remarks.
Perhaps I should shut up and go away.
Scr
I’m not returning to that format for the time being (pictures will probably make a comeback). That may change, if Glark redesigns it in such a way that I can lay things out that way — but it may not.
I resisted moving TN to blog format for years and years, but in the end, I had to face the logistical facts, to wit: 1. my other site has been acquired, which means I no longer have the time or freedom to devote to this site that I had in the past; 2. I have been hand-coding this shit in Macromedia Homesite for almost ten years, and I had to find an easier, faster way to get the content up, or to tell you the truth it wasn’t going to up at all.
Something had to change; this was the solution. I understand it’s not going to please everyone, but I’d ask you to give it some time to evolve.
I don’t normally pipe in – but I just wanted to say I’ve been a TN reader forever (it seems) and I’m excited about the new format. I tended to be lazy and never click over to the Vine from the old setup and now I see what I’ve been missing and I’m enjoying it.
And I personally love WordPress. There’s a great K2 theme out there that actually works with a sidebar widget that makes it so you can make changes without EVER SEEING THE CODE. I considered that an amazing step in personal publishing platforms.
Honestly, I adore it. I was a little “Change? No, change BAD!” at first, but now I’m digging it. I love the comments, because honestly, some days I’m way too lazy to send an e-mail. I also think it’ll be great to meet some of the other readers.
Also, hooray for more random entries between articles and vines!
I’m happy to have TN back at all, and will continue reading it no matter what…but I also miss the separation of the essays and the Vine. I DO like being able to see the comments. I’m curious about how time-consuming it is going to be for you to delete all the spam and trolls, though.
Hiya Sars! Just wanted to pipe in and say that I love that you changed to WordPress. I don’t care how long it takes for Glark to change the layout because I’m sure I’ll be giddy about the RSS feed for a while!
Ooh! Love the new format! I, like Zoot, am lazy and honestly the first thing I thought when I saw the WP blog was, “Apparently she needs things to be easier for her to post.” which I’m all about (although comment management may be interesting for you in the near future).
Congrats on the acquisition and I’m really happy you’ve found a way to keep posting here.
I wanted to chime in and say I, too, love the new format. It loads much faster for me (I am impatient), and it’s a lot cleaner. Design-wise, it’s much more pleasing to the eye. And I too enjoy seeing the Vines mixed in, as I rarely clicked on them before.
Pictures would be nice. Otherwise, I’m all for this design!
MS Word, heh heh, that does weeeeird things when you try to copy and paste from it – I always give my text a cooling off period in Notepad first.
I’m enjoying the new format, good to read the comments and I love the easy access to the archives, as well. It’s all good!
Knowing it’s this or nothing and you’re doing your best to keep this site up at all, I hate to throw my vote in with the “hate it” crew, because I totally understand all your reasoning. But I really do find it confusing that essay/writing content and Vine are not separated. I guess what it boils down to is that I can’t tell what’s new or how much I have to read that day or if I’ve missed something. I miss getting on TN and going “Woah! A new essay AND a new Vine! Today is the best day ever!” or “Oh, hm, nothing new. Okay, tomorrow then.” and moving on. Now I’m all “…? Oh wait, I don’t think I’ve…what’s this? Hm. Did…eh.”
Maybe those of us who feel this way will just get used to it–and clearly we’ll have to, since I am so addicted to this site that it’s literally the only one on the whole internet I’ve remained loyal to through multiple job changes/free-time-to-surf changes/etc. But, since you’ve left this open for the peanut gallery, I just wanted to throw in my two cents that when and if you do get around to reformatting, a re-separation of Vine and Blog would be very welcome. Very.
Oh, and a thank you for many years of keeping me from losing my mind to boredom.
I urge you to get Akismet — it’s a spam blocker that will catch all your spam comments and put it into a little place for you to delete. It’s easy to install and easy to use and you will love it.
Because you don’t require people to validate their comments (by typing in a code or something), all the porn commenters and the drug commenters and the awful gambling site people will send you a zillion comments a minute. I promise Akismet isn’t not adware! I use it on my own site and it has caught something like 42,000 spam comments in the past 9 months.
I love TN, I have been reading it since, I don’t know, a million years ago, and moving to wordpress is awesome and fantastic. You just have to show those spammer jerks who’s boss.
What could be an option for separating Vines and posts is to make a new page (under Write, click Write Page) for Vines only, or to make a new page every time there’s a new Vine, or do it month-by-month, or whatever. The text editor is the same thing, but the content doesn’t show up on the front page as a blog post. The only thing is that it’s not a blog setup. You’d have to edit the same page to get a new Vine on there. You’d still be able to use the rich text editor, of course.
You can parent pages, from what I see. You could have a main page, like you used to have, that explained what The Vine was, and then links to the archives and to the new Vines.
It seems like it’s a pain in the ass whichever way you go, but that’s the only way I see. Perhaps a smarter WordPress user would know better.
I don’t particularly care if they’re separated or not, for what it’s worth. What’s easier for you is what’s better.
I think that the tagging system you seem to have in place will allow people to separate things… I haven’t explored that thoroughly yet, but over at Dooce she has a drop-down menu with all the ‘tags’ that allow readers to look through a particular set of archives, i.e. ‘Vine’ or ‘Essays’ or ‘Challenges’ or ‘Photo essays,’ etc.
zh: Done.
Leigh: I’m not sure I understand: “I guess what it boils down to is that I can’t tell what’s new or how much I have to read that day or if I’ve missed something.” I think either an RSS feed, or checking the dates on the entries (if you visit once a day), should probably solve that. It’s not as elegant, I guess, as the old way, but then, the old way had no RSS capability and entries weren’t auto-dated.
Thank you for switching to a sans-serif font. On the old site, I always had to adjust the text size up to huge letters to read the Vine. This is much better.
Well, I’m very happy with the font & new format, however, I do have a question–why are comments closed on some entries and not others? In particular, you had a grammar question where comments were closed, and I wanted to comment that I agreed with you, but that there was another error in the sentence as well–the “not only” , depending on which rulebook you consult, required a following “but also”.
Marie: I’m getting the feeling comments will be closed on Vines from here on out. Which, personally, I like, because if I send in a Vine letter, it’s not because I want the whole internet’s opinion, it’s because I want Sars’.
I’m sorry to confuse you!
It’s becoming clearer as you’re getting things added and ironed out, you’re right. I guess now it’s just scrolling/clicking through the content until you hit an old article versus opening the page and seeing everything neatly packaged right at the top. My brain will catch up, I’m sure.
But the comments feature is awesome–now my favorite site can take up twice or even three times as much time ;)
If you still find c&ping easier, the RoughDraft program might be less trouble than MS Word. I’ve never had a problem pasting into WordPress from RoughDraft, unlike the miles of random code that MS Word sometimes seems to spontaneously create for no fricking reason.