No posts for over a month because in my mind, BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM had aquired lame-duck status qua design. This involves a non-trivial amount of manual labor porting over comments, as well as media, and it is not yet done, so no complaining if your acid-lined gems of old have temporarily disappeared.
 
Also check out Text Pattern, another promising content management system for blogs.Ever since I had decided I was going to change my content management engine from Blogger to Movable Type I saw little use for adding new writing to a soon-to-be obsolete system. Also, I needed a break. Not from blogging, but from the constraints that the blogging format was beginning to impose on me — or so I felt.

So I redesigned the site. Site design is to me what I imagine gardening is to some people. It just pleases me to do it.

For this latest iteration of BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM, I decided to focus on readability. Specifically, I hankered after the simplicity of the page in a book: black, serifed text on white space. My inspiration came from Robert Bringhurst’s excellent The Elements of Typographic Style, which has become the typographer’s bible since it was first published 10 years ago. Question: What is the ideal amount of characters on a line of text? Answer: 66It is an immense pleasure to read, because it constantly practices what it preaches.

But Elements gave me another idea. It uses marginalia copiously, to great effect. For the web, marginalia seems a natural addition: It breaks off from the narrative’s one-dimensional thread, but does not quite amount to the radical break of a link. It’s an extra half dimension of freedom, allowing short diversions that would otherwise be heaved into brackets, distracting from the flow of the text.

1.618034… or 1 plus the square root of 5, divided by 2.How wide to make the marginalia? I went with the Golden Mean, that naturally pleasing ratio. We’ll see if it works. This site will need a few weeks to mature yet. But welcome back in the meantime. I have plenty to write about.