What I Wish For In 2009

No, not world peace, harmony, and the disappearance of Sarah Palin, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton. Well, I do wish for those things, but . . . . I'll settle for something simpler: I wish bloggers everywhere would understand that ain't no one gonna read their Great Thoughts unless those Great Thoughts are presented in a format that is easy on the eyes. (*1)

That means:

1. NO TEXT ON A BLACK BACKGROUND. NONE. ZIPPO. NADA. No brown, orange, or textured backgrounds. White only, please! (*2)

2. Text in black only. Not red, pink, orange, or, god forbid, yellow. Black. Preferably in a basic font. That gothic-y, script-like stuff is hard to read. Plus it's ugly. (Font size isn't a problem. If it's too small, I just hit the control and + keys to enlarge the screen image.)

3. Paragraphs that are only a couple of sentences long. (Yes, I realize that a paragraph is supposed to be at least three sentences long and express a single coherent idea, but on a computer monitor, paragraphs of more than 2-3 sentences are hard to read.)

4. Bare minimum, one line between paragraphs.

Like this.

5. Screen layouts that are, ya know, readable. That means that your column width should be, at most, a half screen wide. It's almost impossible to read a column of text that runs from one side of the screen to the other. Do these things, and I will read. Otherwise, one visit, and I'm outta there.

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*1: Yes, adding a blog to my rss feed solves many of these problems. I use the Google Reader and every blog's entries are presented in an uncluttered, readable format. But those rss entries often direct me to other blogs that are not on my feed. Upon being taken to those "outside" blogs, I need only five, six seconds to decide whether the appearance is readable or not... Besides, I needed something to complain about.......

*2: I'm not even crazy about the dark background that surrounds the text on this page you're looking at. Presumably I'll be able to dump it when the webmaster switches me over to Movable Type version Whatever. [Note added long after: I wrote this when I was residing at my second website.]