Tweak tweak tweak

I've been infected with the urge to make another round of tweaks to the design of this blog. I think I'm satisfied with the design for now. I'm usually looking for ways to make text easier to read while keeping the design simple and the page load time to a minimum. I'm a big fan of narrow layout for text—I think a narrow width makes text easier to read, like a newspaper column. I think there's even some scientific research which supports this, something about how our eyes scan a page. In any case, narrow text works for me.

And then there's the font. I tried a few fonts. The old serifed font I was using wasn't working for me, so I switched to sans-serif. I think I like this better. It makes the text appear to "breathe" more and look less rigid, I think. I also made sure to give the text sufficient line height. After all that looking for a suitable font, I ended up with plain ol' Arial. I found that it's a good compromise for rendering both English and Japanese text in an acceptable way. The other fonts I tried were either good for Japanese or English text, but not both. Although, I think the rendering of Japanese characters is generic to the common fonts. The rendering is different for different browsers, of course, and I found that Chrome seems to render Japanese characters in the generic fonts better than Firefox.

I also decided to add a sidebar. I originally did not want a sidebar, to keep the design minimal, but I figured that a sidebar would be really convenient for both reader and writer in the long run as the number of posts increases, so I gave in. And it appears that it also has an aesthetic appeal—it gives some sort of counterbalance to the main text. I'll try to keep it uncluttered, though. It's surprising how much time it can take for a simple widget to load.

But enough about this blog design tweaking drivel. I should be writing about other things.

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August 10, 2013 update: I've decided to remove the sidebar with the list of recent posts. Sometimes the widget took a long time to load, and I was also a little concerned that the excerpts would be counted as duplicate content. I'll probably add a list of this blog's labels in its place.