Saturday, March 19, 2005

A word from the ghost in the machine . . .

Anyone who is not reading this as an RSS feed will have noticed some not so small changes in appearance. I finally got tired of all the wasted space and corseted posts. So I have spent a little time figuring out how to make the posts more readable and the sidebar more useable. I'm not sure yet whether I have succeeded. My meddling with the code has been strictly amateur, and I probably should get professional help.

I am not entirely happy with the result at the moment. I think I'd expect to find something looking like the title above the entrance to a funeral home, or worse, a mausoleum. And I can't quite figure out why the borders under post titles don't appear to maintain a uniform distance above the posts themselves.

The central changes for reading have been, of course, going wide-body and adding a grayish background. I think Doug Berman's posts on Sentencing Law & Policy are, for me, the ideal of readability; and he uses a white background for his posts. At the same time, his posts are generally short summaries; mine tend to be longer-winded disquisitions. I personally don't like dwelling long on the glare of white backgrounds white backgounds. That's why I've gone gray.

I invite all to email me directly with reactions to the new look, good or bad, or with suggestions for improving the blog's readability and usefulness.

-The Ghost.

PS: According to this post on How to Save the World, INCourts finds itself running up and down between the 80,000 blogs that have 10 to 50 visits a day and the 18,000 "C List" blogs that have between 50 and 300 visits a day. (The average as of a minute ago was 49. The average a week ago was 55.) I guess we'll see if my untutored web-meddling pushes INCourts down into the bucket of the 5,000,000 blogs with less than 10 visits a day.

1 comment:

T Kemp said...

Mike:

I think the new look is a big improvement. The site is much more readable.

Keep up the good work.

Thomas Kemp

Http://www.kemplog.com