To my mind even this contains unnecessary elements, and I hate fixed-width narrow columns. I've tried to push the limits of the absolute minimum of distraction in my own blog (http://m50d.github.com); I'd be interested to hear of people taking similar approaches.
A couple of Matt's complaints might apply to the design of your blog: tiny fonts and long lines. Long lines are a readability problem because the eye tends to get lost when jumping from the end of a line to the start of a new one. Small fonts are a problem for obvious reasons.
The very first thing I did when your URL loaded was to increase the browser text size. A good rule of thumb when it comes to typography on the web these days is to be very cautious about setting a font-size smaller than the usual 16px browser default.
I'm not quite as stripped down as you, but clicking through to the story on mine gets you to mostly text on a white background. http://odonnellweb.com/anchor/
You weren't actually asking for comments, so sorry if I'm just being annoying, but:
* I love the font size and content column width. More line height than 140% might be good, but I then again have extreme preferences for line height (160%).
* Consider not paginating the posts, or picking a higher limit. You currently have 1 more than you show on the first page, so why not show it on page 1?
* The big image on the search page is funny, but takes a very long time to load. Removing it or moving it to a CDN will make loading that page faster.
* text-align: justify is your friend! Thin columns look weird with right-aligned text.
I like it. I'd maybe adjust the split to favour content over the left image slightly more and clean up a few things, but the design is nice and I love the image panel. Been meaning to do something similar in a few ways.
Having columns too wide hurts readability though: the eye has difficulty tracking which line is next when it flicks from the extreme right of the screen back to the left (or vice-versa for RTL writing systems).
I wonder if he ever A/B tested his preference for narrow columns? When I ran 2 A/B tests on my own site some time ago ( http://www.gwern.net/a-b-testing#max-width-redux ), both turned in 1000/1100px as the top width, and the narrower widths like 800/900px did not do well.
Admittedly, my site is not a blog but long-form content, which makes me wonder how well my results might generalize.
* Was that test just on new users - or subscribers in general? If the latter you're going to self-select for folk who are interested enough in your stuff to read regardless, which will skew the results somewhat.
* Also - judging by the blog topic - you've got a pretty technical audience. One of the few groups that do have the knowledge to use tools and preferences to get around the problem. I'd be leary of generalising that to other markets.
* You're a/b testing on max-width setting - not line length. So a bunch of your users in both groups are going to get exactly the same experience if they're on smaller displays. This will make the improvement on larger displays seem less significant.
* Tests like this can be really skewed if you have audiences that shift device over time (e.g. getting popular link tweeted and retweeted can push sometimes push up the mobile portion of a site enough so that certain display types work better/worse.)
* The line length is something that has interactions with other typographic features like line spacing and font size. Optimising on one alone can lead to poor results.
I'm not saying that you're wrong - but those are things that occurred ;-)
> * Was that test just on new users - or subscribers in general? If the latter you're going to self-select for folk who are interested enough in your stuff to read regardless, which will skew the results somewhat.
I don't have 'subscribers' or 'new users'. Just people visiting the site. (I suppose there's people visiting from the RSS feed, but they're well under 1% of page views.)
> you've got a pretty technical audience...I'd be leary of generalising that to other markets.
OP's blog seems rather technical.
> This will make the improvement on larger displays seem less significant.
True, but this still wouldn't explain why the smaller max-widths - the max-widths that would hit the most viewers - would not win.
> * Tests like this can be really skewed if you have audiences that shift device over time
Certainly, but the 2 tests were separated by something like a year. Is it really likely the audience changed in both a/b tests in the same way?
> * The line length is something that has interactions with other typographic features like line spacing and font size. Optimising on one alone can lead to poor results.
Sure, but in the absence of any specific reason to suspect an interaction...
For me if I hit one of your posts my experience would roughly:
* Wow... that type is small (zoom to 125% - something that I know that the vast majority of users do not know how to do)
* Wow... those lines are still too long for an easy read (zoom to 200% - which gets line length sane for me, but the font size is now huge and killing lots of my vertical real estate)
* God damn that fixed header is annoying and cutting into my already limited vertical real estate as I scroll
However, I do have an bigger footer, because after reading an article the reader should have various options like reading more of my articles, comment via email, flattr me, etc.
I also want a date on every article.
The titles on your overview page are hard to scan, because of the dates in front of them. I put the dates after the titles and dimmed them down.
Your page shows no content when Javascript is disabled (CSS is display: none). Why don't you do the Markdown to HTML conversion statically, or on the server?
Since this seems to be the blog-feedback subthread... I don't have a blog yet, but I've been tinkering with a design for a bit. Feedback is appreciated.
I'm aware that many people hate light-on-dark, and I'm trying to find a solution that makes both me and such users happy.
oh god giant block of closely-leaded tiny text that stretches across my entire browser (which currently is about a foot wide) with no inter-paragraph spacing ABORT ABORT ABORT hits back button
