Blog Bidness

It has always bugged me that the standard blog templates available on Blogger used fixed width columns. I don't know about the vast majority of visitors, but my browser is at a size that leaves a ton of empty white space around the text. There is probably some school of journalistic design that thinks this is very stylish and hip. I didn't attend that school.

A little bit of white space to set things off is a good thing. A lot of white space with this tiny column of text floating in the middle of it is just stupid. I'm reminded here of a clever twist on a familiar saying that is firmly grounded in reality. The optimist sees the glass as half full. The pessimist sees the glass as half empty. The engineer sees the glass as twice as big as it needs to be.

All of this is a wordy lead up to me finding a new Blogger template that adapts the column sizes to your browser width. I may make a few more changes over the next couple days. Depends on how ambitious I feel. Let me know if the new design causes any problems for you. If you're using a RSS reader you should see no impact.

Speaking of RSS readers, I've regularly used Bloglines to check on most of the blogs I follow. It has never been the speediest of sites, but it's useful and free so I continued to use it. Of late it has seemed even slower than usual, often to the point of being non-functional. Maybe the lack of any apparent method of generating income from it has finally caught up with them.

Anyway, I've switched to Google Reader. I tried it when it first became available and there was something or other I didn't like about it. Whatever that was, they've either fixed it or it doesn't bother me anymore. Like most Google apps, it's a bit spartan, but so far it hasn't made me wait several minutes to pull up a specific blog. If you're in the market for a new aggregator you should check it out.