Thanks for the feedback. I still haven’t decided what to do about the Smorgasblog.

Excellent to read this! Most media isn’t geared to anyone over age 30. It is irritating, and demeaning. I have many blog friends over age 50, as I am.

P.S. I find the double sidebar too much, too. I have a 17″ laptop in order to put as much on the screen in one go as possible!

P.P.S. You must keep in mind colour blind and colour deficient readers, as well as the disabled, with voice readers for useability issues.

Hi Dale – I’m glad to hear how useful it is to you, and sorry I haven’t done a better job with it (like, how did I miss that great post by Miguel at Laughing Knees on the funeral for a cat last month?!).

Don’t worry, it wouldn’t move to another site. If I do away with it as a sideblog, the smorgasblog entries would be easily distinguishable from the main content by some sort of special styling: a different fort, a light background color, etc. And you’d still be able to click on the smorgasblog category page and read them all together.

Well, I’m not sure that would match the colors of the other three blogs, but I could try it.

I am really leaning toward eliminating smorgasblog as a sideblog and integrating those posts with the main entries, by the way, so I can go to a single sidebar and get more whitespace around the main column. And then I might also move the series list to a page linked from the menu to reduce some clutter on what would then be the rump sidebar.

O.K., actually it was a quote from Josef Muller-Brockmann in the article from iA on The 100% Easy-to-Read Standard: “The width of the column must be proportioned to the size of the type. Overlong columns are wearying to the eye and also have an adverse psychological effect. Overshort columns can also be disturbing because they interrupt the flow of reading and put the reader off by obliging the eye to change lines too rapidly.”

Well, of course sans-serif fonts are easier to read, so I’m sure you wouldn’t need to go quite as large as I did. There’s an optimal balance between font size and line length which I think Ian Stewart touches on in the blog post introducing Kirby.