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When I Think of Reading
When I think of reading, I think of being bundled up under the covers with the wind howling outside and snow pelting the windows and the glow of the book light while I try to imagine what it would be like walking the razor’s edge to the top of Mount Everest in roaring winds and 100-below-zero wind chill atop a 4000-foot drop on one side and a 7000-foot drop on the other while I turn the pages of Into Thin Air.
That is what I think of when I think of reading a book.
When I think of reading, I think of sitting at the table eating a bowl of cereal with the smell of cologne wafting into my nostrils blending with the taste of granola. I turn from page to page looking for something interesting, sauntering through the ads that catch my attention along the way, and when I lock in on something of interest, halting my sauntering and focusing for a spell until I reach the end of the article.
That is what I think of when I think of reading a magazine.
When I think of reading, I think of being beaten in the cerebral cortex. I think of dredging through page after page of flashing images, movie trailers, sound bytes. I think of scrambling for the back button or resizing my browser because of an animated ad that won’t stop moving so I have to force it out of the viewing area by resizing (at least television gives me a 15 minute break between the barrages of insults). I think of my eyes burning from the glare and assault of luminosity from every color in the spectrum on every page and being angry and anxious to just get to the information and get me the fuck out. I think to myself that this is about as enjoyable as trying to eat good food in a bathroom stall next to a person taking a liquid shit. So I read as fast as I can, skipping over paragraphs, looking for key information, and becoming more and more anxious as I go along.
That is what I think of when I think of reading online.
When I began designing The Writing Machine, I wanted it to be as comforting and painless as reading a book in bed or a magazine at the breakfast table. I threw away many of the web design standards and strove to find what was right for my writing and create an atmosphere calm enough to read in even if it meant that it may be a little harder to figure out how to get around within the site. What I wanted more than anything was to share my writing and, unlike magazines where stories live in a single issue than die in someone’s attic or hibernate in the periodical section in the basement of the local library, I wanted my writing read now and easily accessible in years to come. I wanted people come back often and stay long. And judging from my site traffic statistics, I succeeded.
Then I caught a case of the George Lucas Virus and almost ruined something that was working well already. I created two new designs for the site, and just as I almost pushed one of them out, I realized what I was about to do and so I shot myself in the head. Once I burned the corpse of that madman, I sat down with what was working and did my best to add a few simple changes that would hopefully improve reading online and finding stories in the site.
With that said, over the past few months, I’ve made a few changes to the site and here they are:
Font Size
I increased the font size of the stories two pixels as I felt it makes it easier to read.
Converted Stories from Images to Text
For the first year, all stories were in the .gif file format. I did this because I couldn’t find a font that I felt web browsers rendered clear enough for prolonged online reading. Every web design book will tell you that sans serif fonts (fonts without curls such as Arial or Tahoma) are the best for online reading and serif fonts (fonts with curls such as Times New Roman and Georgia) are better for reading in print. But who says that is always true? I decided that it was on a case by case basis and a serif font worked better for my site and I chose Minion for my font. However, Minion is an Adobe brand font that is on very few computers so most people would not be able to display the text in Minion (in order for a browser to display text with a particular font, the font must be installed on the viewer’s computer). To fix this, I used Adobe Illustrator to create an image of each story I published, using Minion as the font, ensuring everyone could read the stories in what I felt was the optimal reading font for my site and then converted the Illustrator file to a .gif format for the web. Then I discovered a few TypePad blogs using a serif font rendered by the browsers that I liked. I checked the stylesheets for these sites and it turned out to be a font called Georgia. And so I converted the site over to Georgia.
My second motivation for images stemmed from an idea that putting stories in images that couldn’t be easily copied created a psychological feeling of seriousness and would convey the idea that I am serious about my writing and my site. I’m over this.
And the third, and probably most assumed reason, was to make the stories a bit more complicated to steal. But really, that was only a small thought. The opportunity to share my writing for years to come outweighs the risk of someone stealing my work (I should be so flattered).
I finally decided to abandon the images after I read an article about making web pages friendly for people with disabilities who use site readers to surf the web. I know my site is probably not where someone with a site reader may want to go, but just to be safe, I’ve tried to make my site somewhat friendly for them.
I also wanted to make it easier to search the site. As there are more and more stories, it gets harder and harder to wade through the stories and I felt it was time to improve the search capabilities and the only way to do that was to get the stories out of the image format and into a text format search engines could index. And so I did.
All stories, with the exception of those on scanned typewriter pages, are now in a text format and no longer trapped in the confines of an image.
Added a Search Box to the Navigation
Previously, I buried a search feature in the navigation scheme. The search used Google and took you out of The Writing Machine and into Google’s site. As part of the improvements, I connected The Writing Machine to the MovableType search feature and included a search box on every page. But of everything I changed, the search feature was the biggest headache, so as things like this go, it will probably become the least used of the improvements I made. Let’s hope this is not true.
Printer-Friendly Page
I created a way to publish each story (the “print” link above the story title) with the navigation and typewriter image removed to cut down on clutter on the printed page, and as an unexpected side effect, the page is also great for reading online. In fact, I wish I could deliver the entire site this way, it is just so easy to read in this format. But without the ability to thumb back to the table of contents like you can in a book, you have to have navigation, so until I find a better way, I’ll stick with what I have for now.
Dashes and Quotes
One other improvement I did is probably not very noticeable to many people, but I installed a tool that will render em dashes (—), ellipsis (…), apostrophes (Christian’s), and quotes (“unquote”) properly. It is a subtle change, but now quotes curl and em dashes are longer than a hyphen. It just looks more professional and a bit easier to read. I don’t know if I found all these characters when I worked on cleaning them up, but from here on out, these special characters should be looking good.
Drop-Down Menus
I made a few minor rearrangements to the links in the drop-down menus, and changed the background color from grey to white, and the text from black to grey. I think the color change helps lighten the weight of the page.
So after nearly destroying the good thing I created, I am finished with my updates and, much to my elation, back to writing. Please join me again every Sunday and Wednesday for new stories published in an environment as close to the calm and comfort of the printed page as possible. Stop back often, stay long, and remember, you are a stranger here but once.
Thank you for reading The Writing Machine and staying patient with me during these design changes.
Christian
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