I still see many websites where the main content is in a tiny sans serif font. Why do they go out of their way to make their words hard to read?
I suspect it is due to outdated ideas from ye olde web.
There was a time when people running websites felt compelled to get as much as possible “above the fold”, so a smaller font would help you get more words at the top of the page.
Also, they believed that a sans serif font was better for computer screens because the serifs — those tails on the tops and bottom of letters — would look fuzzy on low resolution monitors.
Those are things you no longer have to worry about.
These days, your visitors are so used to scrolling that it is often the first thing they do. They quickly scan the entire page, top to bottom, to make sure it’s worth their while. There are a gazillion other things on the internet that could be more interesting.
Your readers also have much better computer screens these days. Resolutions are so good that they sometimes go beyond what the human eye is capable of discerning. Not only do serifs show up just fine, they also do a great job of helping you read. That’s because the letters of the alphabet are vertical but we read horizontally. The serifs help glide your eyes along.
I try to practise good typography on Newsonaut because I want it to be an easy read. If you want the same thing for your readers, hop over to Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography. You don’t have to read the whole thing. In fact, he claims to be able to impart the basics in just 10 minutes.
Of course, he would really like you to buy a font, maybe one of his. I can’t argue with that. The quality of a purchased font is often head and shoulders above what you can get for free. Even if you can’t afford to go this route, it’s still a good idea to read his advice. You may be able to find something that comes close on Google Fonts. I use Newsreader on this site.
Just don’t be afraid of serifs. They were invented to make reading easier.
No law says your archive has to be boring. You can nerd it up with stats, which I have done with my own archive.
First, I figured out how to get Textpattern to automatically keep track of how many blog entries I made each year. I already knew how to do this for the grand total, so it was just a matter of making a few adjustments.
Now, as you scroll down, you can see the number of posts in the heading for each year.
Then I came across a nifty sparkline graph on Chris Burnell’s website. It’s an example of his web component, svg-sparkline. So, of course, I made one for Newsonaut.
It’s pretty simple to use, a lot simpler than trying to make one on your own. You just point to a JavaScript library that Chris has made available on a CDN, then customize some HTML to make it look the way you like.
The gradient option is a nice touch for the fill. You can also make it animate, with the line drawing itself from left to right. I thought about doing this, but decided not to get too carried away.
The graph itself, though, is a stark reminder that this blog started with a bang. I posted 170 articles in 2011, almost one for every two days.
At the time, I was working for a daily newspaper, so the idea of churning and burning was nothing new to me. But it didn’t take long for output to drop off. The low point was a single post in 2018.
There was a surge in 2020 when I decided to post every day in October. I thought it might get me into the groove of posting more often, but in the end I was just relieved that the month was finally over and I could relax.
I haven’t exactly been flooding the blog with words in recent years, but things have been picking up. This is my seventh post this month.
What’s helping is that I’ve been finding more and more inspiration from the indie web movement, the latest being a forum called 32-Bit Café. I’ve also seen some great examples at People and Blogs.
There are a lot of little things like the sparkline that keep me going, but mostly it’s the indie web ideal of writing for the pleasure of it.
Of course, there is a subreddit for RSS. Of course, someone there was able to provide me a link to the kind of explainer page I was musing about just a few days ago.
To quote myself:
I almost think it might be worth creating a one-page website that anyone with RSS could link to. “Welcome to RSS. Here’s why you should use it and how.”
Matt Webb saw the same need and went ahead and did it with About Feeds, a web page whose sole purpose is to give beginners the why and how of RSS. I sent him an email giving my thanks.
Matt also has a blog post explaining how RSS could be improved, and I found myself agreeing with pretty much all of it, especially this part:
If you don’t know what RSS is, it’s really hard to start using it. This is because, unlike a social media platform, it doesn’t have a homepage. Nobody owns it. It’s nobody’s job to explain it.
With help from Claude, I was able to create a nicely formatted preview of the Newsonaut RSS feed, along with basic instructions on how to subscribe. And, for the uninitiated, a link to About Feeds
Unfortunately, the technology used for styling feeds is no longer supported by Chrome and will likely be deprecated soon by all the major browsers. They give technical reasons, but it really does feel sometimes like RSS is being marginalized in favour of silos inspired by the profit motive.
Not to be deterred, I created a modal instead. It doesn’t have a preview of the feed, but it has the same simple instructions plus a link to About Feeds. Click the RSS button in the top navigation to see it in action.
I would like to see other creative efforts to make RSS more approachable. This is my humble attempt. Maybe there are better ideas out there.
It used to be when you wanted to send an email to Newsonaut, you’d go through gmail.com. I recently switched to a newsonaut.com address, but it didn't take long for bots to scrape it and start spamming me.
My solution was to convert all the characters in the address to HTML entities. These are bits of code that are meant to help browsers decipher special characters such as a copyright symbol, but are available for every letter in the alphabet.
The idea is that bots won't bother with deciphering them and will move on to greener pastures.
There are plenty of online services that do conversions for free, but you have to wonder what they’re getting out of it. Maybe it’s ad revenue or maybe they’re hoping someone will be foolish enough to input their email address.
The solution is a free app called Boop. Download it to your Mac, and you have the ability to do a plethora of text conversions. Plus, with JavaScript, you can create your own. In this case, I chose “HTML encode all characters”. That’s as opposed to the more usual case where you only want to encode special characters.
Anyway, here’s hoping HTML entities keep those pesky bots off my lawn.
I’ve been trying to think of a better experience for people who click on an RSS link or button.
It currently seems like gate-keeping. If you know what RSS is, you’ll figure it out. Everyone else will be baffled. Chrome shows you code, Safari offers to open an app, Firefox downloads a file.
Compare that with the experience you get from clicking on a social media icon. You’re told exactly what to do and how to do it.
Why can’t we have something like that for RSS? I’m not about to send people to the Wikipedia page.
Over at thriftmac, I’m trying something different. It’s a site about free Mac apps, so I’m linking visitors to a page telling them about free Mac RSS apps, along with basic instructions on how to use them.
I almost think it might be worth creating a one-page website that anyone with RSS could link to. “Welcome to RSS. Here’s why you should use it and how.”
If we want to help wean people off the algorithms, we need to make it easy. Give them a few simple instructions to get them started, and they can take it from there.
You can get a badge for your blog declaring that you never, ever use AI. While it’s true that I never, ever use AI for my writing, I did use it once to make a graphic for an April Fools Day joke about how Apple is making the corners on its windows rounder than ever.
Also, I use AI quite a bit to help me with coding problems, although I can’t remember if I’ve done this for Newsonaut. Let’s just say it’s possible.
I definitely used it to help me create a WordPress theme from scratch for my wife’s blog, The Animal Reporter. It used to be the common wisdom was to take someone else’s theme and tweak it. I always hated this because it took away my creative freedom.
I initially thought of using WordPress for Newsonaut back in 2010 when it started up, but could not get my head around it. I settled on Textpattern for this reason, and have been happy with it ever since. It makes me glad there was no AI back then because I believe to this day that Textpattern is the better choice.
Still, AI has opened up new worlds for me beyond WordPress templates. For example, it has helped me deploy a website based on a static site generator and create a PHP-based guestbook, among other things.
The many hours I used to spend in Stack Overflow have been replaced by as little as a few minutes in Lumo or Le Chat.
So there you have it — full disclosure.
Thinking back on it, what would I have done for my April Fools Day graphic in the days before AI? I guess I could have made a crude approximation and tried to pass it off as a mockup. Maybe that would have been funnier. It’s something to keep in mind for next time.
Here’s how to make your post as hard to read as possible.
Step 1: Make it all one paragraph, the longer the better.
Step 2: Don’t put in any subheadings. If you’ve followed step 1, you won’t be able to do this anyway.
Step 3: Resist the urge to reformat some sentences as bulleted lists. Keep those sentences nice and long.
Step 4: Most importantly, make everything lower case. This includes the starts of sentences, the word “I” and any proper nouns.
This final step ensures that readers will balk at even attempting to read your post. Seeing a formless blob of grey, they will move on to something more appealing.
Good job. You’ve accomplished your goal.
What’s that you say? All lower-case is more conversational and authentic? Maybe so, but it's still hard to read.
There’s a guy who occasionally publishes reviews on Reddit that are honest, informed and non-monetized. I trust him and have in fact bought one of the things he recommended. I use it often, and I’m glad to have it.
Lately, though, I’ve noticed something different about his reviews. They seem to flow a little better, the sentences are a little less awkward, the rough edges have been sanded off. Has he suddenly become a better writer? I would like to think so, but more likely he’s taken to running his reviews through AI.
What a shame.
Before, he had a voice, a personality that I could imagine with a passion he enjoyed writing about. Now, he’s . . . I don’t know what to call it. Some words on the internet?
If you really want to improve your writing, there are some great books to help you do that. A good start is On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which is itself well written and thus an easy read.
Here’s what he wrote in the book’s introduction in 2001:
Ultimately, however, good writing rests on craft and always will. I don't know what still newer electronic marvels are just around the corner to make writing twice as easy and twice as fast in the next 25 years. But I do know they won't make writing twice as good. That will still require plain old hard work — clear thinking — and the plain old tools of the English language.
Whatever you do, keep your own voice, even if it is unvarnished. It’s part of who you are, and we appreciate it.
I’ve been interested in the concept of the indie web for a few years now, but have struggled to take part in a meaningful way.
I wrote about an early attempt in 2024 when I discovered that you can get a random RSS feed from indieblog.page. To this day, I continue to get 10 random posts every day in my feed reader.
The problem, though, is that those posts are rarely of any interest. They tend to be extremely niche. Typically, they are about a technology I don’t understand or something personal suitable mainly for friends and relatives.
I haven’t given up, though.
Kagi Small Web is another way to randomly find indie web posts. I find that it’s good for filling in a few minutes of boredom, but I’m pretty sure I’ve found only a few articles that I enjoyed reading.
There is a more recent effort called Blogosphere, where you can go through the latest posts of indie sites chosen by the developer. With a fair bit of scrolling, I can find one or two articles worth reading — so it's not bad. You can also sign up and follow your favourites, but why not do that with your feed reader?
The latest I’ve come across is Bubbles, which came out about a month ago. It allows for up-voting and comments, both of which help surface articles worthy of your attention. It’s like getting recommendations from like-minded people. There is also a daily briefing for the top posts, and a hall of fame for the top blogs.
It might seem a little too close for comfort to the corporate world of Reddit, but I’m willing to live with that. If the indie world is going to flourish, it needs a way to make itself known. Bubbles might not be the best way to do this, but it’s the best I’ve found so far.
Apparently, Apple likes those big-ass round corners so much that they have decided to go all-in with what they’re calling “circular” design. Here’s an example I found for TextEdit.
