Metapost: Latest changes to the site

Last week an old friend of mine was interviewed on C-SPAN (transcript here). Um, maybe I should clarify: he's not old; he's just someone I used to know and haven't seen in years. Today, he runs a very popular blog, and this was the subject of the interview.

In the interview, Markos had this to say:

A lot of the blogging tools ... have templates – I mean, the idea of a blog is to make it so that anybody with no technical skills can publish online... Part of that process is having a design for the Web site. Most people don’t know how to design a Web site, wouldn’t know where to begin. So, Movable Type and Blogger both have templates that you can choose from to build your site with.

The problem is, when you have hundreds of bloggers using the same template it’s hard to really differentiate yourself from the crowd. From the beginning I designed an entirely different [site]... I mean, it’s an orange site... [It's] not the most attractive site. But if you visit [it]... and see something you like, you’re going to remember.

I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to a blog [and] thought, oh, this is pretty good stuff. And then two hours later I have no idea where that site is, because it looked like every other site and I can’t tell them apart.

I guess don't have to be embarrassed to admit, since it is so plain to see, that I use a standard template. I think I have the skills necessary to design a site; I just don't have the time to do the things I'd need to do to differentiate my blog from the hundreds of others that also use the "dots dark" template.

One small thing I did recently was to change the font for the blog title. It used to be Arial/Helvetica, left justified in the left-hand column. The typeface always looked odd to me, especially since the rest of the text is in the Verdana typeface -- a different sans-serif font. So I changed the font to Courier New, made it bigger so that each word gets its own line, and centered the text in the column. Watch out... this blogger is living life on the edge!