Mythokia

I’m sorry for switching the theme on you readers again. I realize that it’s not pleasant to have to relearn a new layout each time you visit my blog, but it had to be done.

It’s always the small UI quirks that get me. As much as I loved the soft look of the previous theme, the few small details kept coming back and bugging me.

First and foremost, was the location of the sidebar. Traditionally, the navigation menu has been on the left side of the page (or the top), but over the recent years, most blogs have it located on the right. I find that this makes tremendous good sense as it minimizes the distance one would have to move between the scroll bar and the navigation menu. Of course this problem wouldn’t exists if you used the wheel located on the mouse, but I’ve never been a great fan of that. The wheel doesn’t offer me the precision necessary to scroll text while I read and digest them. Don’t tell me about smooth wheel plugins, those make things even much worse. The wheel is great for other things, like scrolling text in blocks, or zooming, but just not for this purpose.

Secondly, the font size was just too darn small for when I’m not pressing my nose to my monitor. I’ve to squint to read when I’m tired. I’m not sure if any of my readers noticed, but I certainly did.

Another thing was the fixed size layout. At 1280×1024, the last great dividing resolution between normal LCD monitors and gigantic widescreen ones, and the last acceptable resolution to be running a browser in fullscreen (I hope if you have a 2560×1600 monitor, you’re not wasting all that screen real estate by running one instance of a browser full screened), there is just too much white space. I understand the rationale between packing text into a fixed and not too lengthy column facilitates better reading, but this goes back to the font sizes. If the font size was larger, the column could have been wider and thus, pack the same amount of characters on the same line despite the wider space to fill.

I could alternatively write my theme that suited all my quirks and oddities, but I’m horrible at CSS. As I told my project members once while we were developing a web application, “if I had my way, this whole site would have been nothing but plain text”. I’m pretty sure that if I got down to working on it, the result would be an abomination. Once again, apologies to my readers, but the village had to be destroyed in order to save it.