Tinker, Tweak and Adjust

Still playing with the format of Half-Bakered. I enlarged the font size of the posts, for those with old eyes, and I went back to the Times New Roman font, which I think seems to work better. I'll be moving the graphic links over to the right-hand column to help with page loading, so that the text becomes visible faster.

Some have fussed about the "white text on black background" issue. Fair enough. But try this experiment: Find your favorite lots-of-white site (LeanLeft, Instadude, Unca) and read it for a while, at least ten minutes or so. Then go to Half-Bakered. How do your eyes react? Not too badly, right? Maybe even relief? Now, read HB for about the same time and go back to the white site. Blinding, yes? Painful? My thinking is that reading books is reflected light from a rough surface (paper), but staring into a monitor which may also have glare is having a light pointed into your eyes. With the black background, you have a far softer surface to observe. YMMV.

Yes, that's a PayPal link up there. I wish I'd thought of this before the Instalanche, but better late than never. If only one percent of those visitors had given just five dollars, it would have paid for a year's hosting and lots of extra bandwidth, with some to spare. Please, if you think what I do has some merit, and you can afford it, please drop something in the tipjar. Thanks!

(I also want to rethank the anonymous person who paid a couple of years ago to make Half-Bakered an ad-free Blogspot account. They never came forward to be honored, so I'm doing the honoring again, here. It was a very generous thing to do.)

Does anyone have an old copy of Photoshop they can spare? One that will work with an AMD 300mhz processor, not a new version. I use something called PhotoDeluxe that came with my IBM scanner. It's a fair enough program, as all my graphics stuff shows, but it's cranky, picky and missing some key features, like being able to match skin tones and textures. It was also designed by marketers, not engineers, and always gives you a very hard time whenever you want to work outside of their proprietary PDD format, or in ways not of their suggestion. I do OK work now, but feel I could do superior work with better tools. I can't possibly afford Photoshop itself; an older hand-me-down would still be a major improvement. Let me know! You'd be assisting in the creation of art! (Oh, OK...satire. Whatever.)

Lastly, I'm still working on the move to a Moveable Type blog directly on the hollihan.net site. That's partly why I'm tinkering with the format. Does anyone have any advice or suggestions about what I can do now to make it possible to bring along the old Blogspot archives when I set up the MT blog?

Well, early to bed for me. See y'all later! Thanks as always for reading this silly vanity project.