theblogbitme

During my search for a blog font, I came across the notion that fonts are very similar to regional accents. Some fonts are easier for some people to read than others, while some accents are easier for some people to hear than others.

I love other languages and lived in Italy for four months in college. I wrestled with my Italian language skills and became able to exist in Rome with my rudimentary Italian. I could get gelato, go grocery shopping, and ride multiple forms of transportation throughout the city. However, once we traveled outside of Rome, we became aware that Italian is a language that is comprised largely of regional dialects. When you ask what is considered the official dialect, you will receive various answers depending on which region you ask the question. However, most people will default to the Tuscan dialect, I think mostly due to the nation’s allegiance to Dante.

Recently, my husband and I were listening to NPR and caught a BBC program. The content of the program was interesting, but we had a difficult time interpreting the British accents. However, after a few minutes, our ears became more accustomed to the accents and made the rest of the program much easier to hear.

This is how I am starting to see fonts. There are many fonts that you can use in your design and that are capable of communicating with your readers. However, some fonts are easier on the eyes than other fonts. Also, with the variety of operating systems and browsers, you will never be able to completely control how your font is interpreted on every screen. All you can do is try to make the ability for other people to read your site as easy as possible.

I love NPR. One of my podcast subscriptions is NPR’s Story of the Day. I will either listen to these stories after work or transfer them to my iPod and listen to them when I am out and about. A story I recently heard is called Students Blossom in the Desert. It is part of a series on one-room schools in the United States. In this story, NPR goes to a one-room school in Death Valley, CA. It is a story about one teacher’s impact on a kindergarten pupil, Taylor Alford. Taylor arrived on the first day of school unable to speak. The journey of Taylor and her teacher provokes thought on the philosophy of education.

I have been searching to find out how to directly post podcasts onto this blog, but have not found the answer yet. I found many sites on how to make my own podcasts, but not posting another site’s podcast. I also do not know it is legal to just upload the NPR podcast file onto my server and then just post the file. How is that different than posting a video clip from YouTube? Any thoughts?

After much thought, I decided to change my blog font back to the basic san serif fonts supported by both Macs and PCs. While the font is rather boring, I think the highest priority should be the ability to read the blog. Enjoy.

One of my first jobs was at a ski resort in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I worked in the ski school department and would place skiers in various classes for their skill set. The crazy thing about this job, however, was that when I started, I had no idea how to ski. I had recently moved to California from the Midwest and was no stranger to snow, but in the Midwest, we had no hills, much less mountains. I had no idea what to do with two slick planks under my feet with two skinny poles in my hands to assist me from falling on my face. I have plenty of embarrassing stories.

One of my favorite stories was my first time up the slope when I lost one ski and one pole getting on the ski lift. Luckily, I was actually on the ski lift, so I had a few minutes to compose myself and think of how to gracefully get off the lift with only one ski. Needless to say, I fell flat on my face and rolled out of the way so as to not get killed by other skiers and snowboarders coming in rapid progression off the assembly line like ski lift. One of the tricks I learned that winter is that if you cannot ski without poles, you really cannot ski. A skilled skier relies on their legs to work the edges of their skis to push against the slope of the mountain to control direction, speed, etc. While poles can aid in this process, it can also hinder the skier if they are not used properly. If you really want to test your skiing ability, put both poles in one hand and then take off down your favorite run.

Skiing without poles is the image I conjured up in my head today as I was reading my next lesson in my Bulletproof Web Design book by Dan Cederholm. Today I read how to make sure your site will retain its basic communicability and structure without CSS. You can test your site with a few different tools, such as favelets or the web accessibility toolbar. With these nifty tools, you can disable CSS with a click of a button or also test your site in a number of other ways by verifying code, checking various screen resolutions, etc. A few helpful links include, Accessify.com and Tantek.com.

I had a little exposure to this concept of disabling CSS to test your site with CSS Naked Day. However, now that I have a bit more knowledge of the subject, it is making a lot more sense. Just like skiing without poles, you may not know the quality of your site until you turn off your CSS and check the site’s usability. Granted, I am not at that point yet with this site, but will be eventually.

In my WordPress Calendar Plugin article, I noted that HTML comments can be added to code to either insert your own comments regarding code definitions or to signal browsers to skip sections of code without physically erasing the code from the file. I have also learned that this is also true for CSS comments. For example, /*this is a description of why this code is here*/ or /*browser please skip this section of code*/. I know for most of you out there, this is perhaps too elementary to even mention. However, for me, this is a little discovery. My books are not HTML & CSS for dummies, so the writers assume a basic knowledge of the subject. When I catch on to what is going on, a little cartoon-like lightbulb appears over my head as I am studying up. Hopefully this little tidbit will aid someone out there who is also learning from the ground up.