Sunday 26 April 2009

A font with a mind of its own

I've just, very painfully, modified the Ashton Singers website (http://www.ashtonsingers.hampshire.org.uk/) to have a nice blue background and an even nicer logo (both courtesy of the choir's resident graphic designer) ... so far so very good ... and to use Garamond. Oh dear. Garamond is a lovely font for printing - I did the last concert programme in it & it looked miles more professional that any other programme I have ever done - but it really doesn't work well on the screen, especially in small sizes - I think this is partly because the letters are made of very thin strokes. The actual size doesn't seem to go up linearly with the point size. The italic is very small and very narrow (unless you apply bold to it, when it suddenly becomes enormous). All very strange.

Friday 24 April 2009

I promise this is my last rant this month ...

Why do people post stuff like this (this particular one is off the BleedYellow blog)?

'Test Blog
This is test for to Publish on Blogging.'

If you want to start blogging, why not wait until you have something to say? Meaningful content provides just as good a test. Otherwise please don't waste our bandwidth. Would you 'phone someone you didn't know and say 'sorry, just testing'?

Worst moment so far as a Saints fan ... approx 7.15pm yesterday

Leon Crouch came on 5 Live and managed to sound
a) naive
b) inarticulate
and, worse, to expose the labyrinthine workings of the so called brains at St Mary's in a way that made the actions of the Football League seem completely reasonable.
Having said which, relegation and the loss of 10 points may yet seem minor problems.

Friday 17 April 2009

Thoughts on Twitter

Following a great session on Enterprise 2.0 at our recent IT Forum meeting, led by Jon Mell, I've been trying to use Twitter sensibly - both as a poster and as a reader.

1) I love the idea that organisations are waiting for feedback on their products to come up on Twitter - I still await a response from Lexmark and/or Linksys to a comment I posted today about the evident incompatibility of my Lexmark printer and my Linksys print server ... I'm not holding my breath though, they did only cost £45 between them.

2) I use the 'search' capability quite a bit. I tried subscribing to a search on 'choral', but got disillusioned pretty quickly - it highlighted a problem with any subscription to Twitter content other than as a follower - people don't post the context of what they are writing. For this reason I am trying hard to make my posts meaningful when read in isolation.

3) Why do people think 'xxx rocks' is a meaningful thing to post on its own? If you like something, take the time to tell us why - otherwise what is the point of the post? (Anyway, although I accept that this is a personal view, the use of the word 'rocks' in this sense really annoys me. http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/rock_2?view=uk)

4) I am puzzled by some of the people who follow me - I wonder what on earth they get out of it? It seems unusual to get a reply to a post.

5) I find an RSS reader (in my case SharpReader) an excellent vehicle for Twitter content.