We could use some relief after yesterday’s heavy (and eventually contentious to the point of closing comments) discussion. So I thought maybe you could help with a little blog “housekeeping.”
Everybody seems to like the new blog (thank you). But I’m still tinkering with fine points of design. On two of those, I’d like to know your preferences.
Organizing comments
When Living Freedom was at BHM, comments were displayed strictly in chronological order. Here, we’ve got nesting comments. When you reply to another Commentariat member, your comment goes beneath theirs, slightly offset, instead of in the order it was posted. (That is, it does so until the maximum depth of the nest settings has been reached, as happened yesterday.)
I personally prefer chronological comments. I find them easier to keep track of. But I can see why others might like the back-and-forth conversational nature of nesting.
So I’ll let you guys decide which you want us to use here.
Fonts
I’m also thinking about changing the typeface from the present serif to a sans-serif. Like so:
Back when I was in the advertising and corporate communications business, it was an article of faith that Americans found serif faces easier to read, while European eyes and minds were better adapted to sans. But I believe that’s changed now. I like the clean look of sans and am considering bagging the serifs and going for the simple, stripped-down look.
That particular sans-serif font also seems to be naturally a little larger than the current typeface. WordPress grants bloggers surprisingly little control over font sizes, but this particular WP theme does offer an almost endless selection of fonts to try. I picked the strongest and most readable sans face I could find.
So what do you think?
1) Chronological order. I like the nesting idea a lot, but got lost a couple of times in the longer commentary on Tolerance.
2) Serif, preferably, but I can live with san-serif. Can you show other san-serifs for comparison? The one you used turned me off – but it might look better if smaller.
P.S: I’m going to be changing my email address soon. What’s the easiest way to do that – Just put the new one in, and let you moderate it?
I like the nesting comments, and the fact that it only goes a few levels deep before bottoming out is a blessing on this tiny screen. There are a couple of blogs I follow where after a short exchange subsequent comments are a vertical column of single characters. That’s tough on old eyes.
Back in the day, when Aldus Pagemaker was a new thang, we learned sans for titles and chapter headings, serif for body text since it’s easier to read at 10 or 12 points. I was boring, I used Arial and Times New Roman for every-damn-thing.
OT, but reading Pat’s comment she snuck in before I submitted reminded me, how do you set avatars in this software?
Please don’t make the font smaller! I can’t have the only pair of old eyes… sigh And a little greater contrast wouldn’t hurt anything either. I mostly use the email notification feature, and read most of the comments there, so the order of the comments at the blog is immaterial to me.
ML — I’m not even thinking about making the font smaller. I do wish WP would let me set font sizes; I’d make them larger. If they give you trouble, by all means use either the zoom feature in your browser or set a larger size in your browser and don’t allow sites to override it.
RG — I’ll have to look up avatars and get back to you. Looks as if ML figured it out, but I don’t know yet.
Pat — Re changing email addy, yes, just go ahead and use your new one. Yep, it will send your first comment with the new address to moderation, but after that you should be fine. As to other sans-serif faces, I did take three or four screen shots, but all the sans faces that I thought were readable were pretty much alike. Others I looked at were oddball in some way (highly condensed, funky, etc.)
Okay, so one v*te for nesting, one for chronological. This is closer than Hillary and Donald!
“This is closer than Hillary and Donald!”
Well, I may be a female, but please – no comparisons! 🙂
Re avatars, apparently WP is set up by default to use only Gravatars (https://en.gravatar.com/). Looks as if there are plugins available to bypass Gravatar and use site-specific avatars, but so far (in my quick pre-tea search), I found one that charges a fee and one whose terms don’t make sense to me. I’ll finish my morning tea and keep on checking.
LOL! Sorry, Pat. Nothing personal, I assure you.
“subsequent comments are a vertical column of single characters. That’s tough on old eyes.”
And tough on brains of any age! FWIW, comments here are set to go a maximum of five deep.
Re. fonts, it’s not my place to complain, but since you asked: I’ve been a bit … dissatisfied … with your current font since you moved to the new blog. On my Linux PC with PaleMoon browser it renders as an unusually unreadable font. I don’t care about serif vs. sans-serif, but surely WP has a better serif font? (Your screenshot of a sans-serif font looks very readable, but that’s showing me how your computer renders it, not how mine will.)
I think the current font set looks very nice, but for some reason fonts have never bothered me unless they were really freaky.
I like nested comments because they make it easier to keep branching internal discussions straight. But again, not a major issue for me (unless reverse chronological gets thrown in there, as some commenting systems allow; that makes zero sense in terms of how one might actually have a discussion).
The current setup is nice and clean, allowing the reader to focus on the content. Anything beyond that doesn’t matter a great deal.
Good point, Brad. Whatever I choose is going to display differently on other people’s computers. Sigh. Still, if readers say they want a serif font, I can experiment with something different than what I’m now using.
It’s an odd thing. This theme comes with over 700 font choices, but no good way to see what those fonts look like before trying them (few of them have familiar font names and the majority seem to be novelty fonts that nobody would ever use on a blog, anyhow) and no way to adjust font size. Seems that priorities are misdirected when it comes to fonts.
I like the nested chain. One can ID the 5 most recent in the Recent Comments area to the right. So, except when the comments come in fast it’s not too bad to track.
I’ve given up on the font size. It’s not your page I’ve discovered, FireFox and WP don’t play that nicely together elsewhere as well.
Pick what pleases you. If you like it then the quality of your efforts will come through, giving us all the enjoyment of your writings, the web is just a medium. Don’t turn it into a j*b.
I like chronological order; not all responses are “single-thread” (sometimes ideas overlap!) and it’s just easier to read and follow. “@personA” works, too, if necessary, to show that it’s a response.
And I’ve always thought (working in printing at IBM in a past life) that the purpose of serifs was to improve readability…up until they don’t. 😉
I’m not obsessive about it, though, and both bigger and bolder fonts work similarly.
For what it’s worth, I use the Penscratch theme on a WP site I manage, and I find it quite readable. If I’ve decoded the CSS correctly, it’s using a font called ‘Roboto Slab’. (A name that would discourage me, if I were just presented with a list of font names.)
Ha, success.
So what did you do to get that avatar to show, RG?
Signed this email addy up for Gravatar, and uploaded the image. Apparently when a WordPress page is viewed, the placeholder for the avatar is an image tag for Gravatar’s account for that user’s email address. It has to happen in the visitor’s browser, nothing else would populate that fast.
I can’t do it easily from the phone and the desktop machines are already broken down, but ask your web guy to have a look at the page code and see if it’s exposing commenters’ email addresses. I’ll be pleased if they have obscured that information, but the simplest way to substitute the image would be with a tag something like <img src="www.gravatar.com/your address" and a closing bracket.
He used a Gravatar account.
And there’s the web guy.
He’s a Djinn, isn’t he, Claire? That was suspiciously fast.
@Rusty Gunner: When you post a comment, WordPress sends the email address to Gravatar, which does a lookup. If it finds a matching Gravatar, it hands WP a URL to the image you specified. That URL is placed in an <img> tag and is what appears on the page. Your email address is not visible to visitors (but is for site admins).
If the supplied email address isn’t linked to a Gravatar account, WP uses a placeholder image.
On the question of fonts, I found the Google fonts page: https://fonts.google.com/
I’m not sure I have every one of them at my disposal via this WP theme, but most of them.
I’m quite fond of Tenor Sans which, a nice compromise between serif and sans. But there are quite a few there that might be worth trying. (I’m discovering, though, that many fonts that look good on that page, are far too weak for readability when reduced to the size used in a blog post.)
Of course as Brad reminds, every computer is going to display only the fonts it has available. Which might possibly mean nothing but either a generic sans or a generic serif. So it’s a crapshoot no matter what.
Chronologic comments for me. Especially in longer comments, its hard to find new comments with nesting.
Font: don’t specify a font at all. The user agent (i.e. broswer) will use a font face chosen in user preferences. I actually have my browser set to override specified fonts, and always use Bitsream Vera Sans, because that’s what I like to read. How I wish I had saved a quote from Tim Berners-Lee back in the early days of the web, regarding what markup was supposed to do, and what things the user agent was responsible for.
My hyper-opinionated opinion: The web is not print media, so web authors shouldn’t try to treat it that way. 😉
p.s. A gravatar is a self-imposed cookie.
Oh, forgot to say that there are a ton of studies out there on typefaces and readability. The gist, IIRC, is that san-serif is better for screen reading, vs. serif being better for print.
and arrgh! c/its/it’s/
IF you are limiting the “nested chain” to 5, then I certainly prefer chronological order, which is what the nested chain turns into after 5, confusing posters. Actually, I believe I prefer chronological regardless. Hopefully, commenters will state who/what they are responding to. However, if you use nesting, I would prefer unlimited “nests” as less confusing.
As to fonts, the most readable and largest but as a poster suggested, the reader has some control over that. Your original font seemed very nice.
I know it got “tacky” in your post on Vin’s article but I found it extremely interesting and informative. Thank you Claire, Vin and all participants.
My preference is for serifs, but sans serif is acceptable. My main concern is readability.
I like the idea of nested comments, but I think the chronological arrangement is actually less confusing.
There’s a free browser extension, Clearly, that allows you to set your type face, size and background color. The neat thing about Clearly is that when you click on its icon in your browser’s tool bar, it changes the page so that only the predominant block of text is shown—side bars and other columns are excluded. The text is shown in your chosen type face and size. This is helpful for viewing newspaper articles and blog posts. It doesn’t do this automatically, so your regular browser display is the default until you click the Clearly icon, and you can easily toggle back to the normal page view.
Clearly is meant to work with the program Evernote, but you don’t have to have or use Evernote to use Clearly. I use it in Firefox and don’t use Evernote.
Why is it that I often feel the need to post right effin’ now, despite recognizing that I’ve been sitting too long, and it’s time to get out of the chair? 😛 It’s almost as if I’m obsessed or something. (NO, that really doesn’t describe me.)
Anyways, as an example, What’s the most readable font for the screen? That covers the basics of the question. You can get some inkling of how this can be an issue by simply opening up your font manager program, and noting options to tweak how things such as font hints and smoothing are handled. Well, on my system, I can do that; I think it’s a standard feature in Gnome (well, actually Xfontconfig, or whatever that’s called these days). And, while desktop monitors have generally improved over time in things such as pixel density, there are still a lot of variables in screen display, vs. print, and in designing for the screen, one simply doesn’t have the sort of control available with print media. I’m currently working with one “authoring” interface which thinks it has more control than it does, and the results are gruesome.
I was hoping to find something more informative, referencing the development of the Droid font family, which was developed specifically for mobile screens, but on a quick web search, it’s all ‘… was develped for mobile screens’ with going into the gory details. IIRC, Amazon developed a typeface specifically for the Kindle reader.
I’m almost constantly using the text-zoom function in my browser, because the delivered page has letters either too small or too large. It would be a boon to me if, for things other than headings or condensed calendar displays where font size issues do matter, web designers would simply not specify any font information at all. The browser override doesn’t always work, and I’m a bit mystified why that is, but not to the point of trying to dig into it.
If I were really ambitious (I’m not 🙂 ) I’d screenshot what Zero Hedge comment threads look like to me. Well, RustyGunner has already mentioned the column of single letter phenomenon. I haven’t noticed what Tahn referred to. If there isn’t a reply link in the comment, I use the next one up which exists, and it goes chronological, but still in the chain of the orginal comment.
I almost never sign up for e-mail notification of new comments. I just revisit the page and search for my name, as that’s a convenient bookmark for when I last commented. Everything below that is new. (Or would be, using simple chronological order.)
I suppose the nested comment issue is similar to other web authoring things – the people who implement them are using a display significantly wider than I am, so they don’t see how exquisitely unreadable comments become when nested too deeply, with the attendant indentation.
Nesting yes is my vote.
Fonts no opinion.
Jed says ” If there isn’t a reply link in the comment, I use the next one up which exists, and it goes chronological, but still in the chain of the orginal comment.”
I had no idea that would work. If this does indeed work, how is that different than unlimited nesting? Perhaps it is “unlimited nesting” for the techies but us “dummies” (and I am certainly one, no offense) are limited to 5?
Now that could get confusing. I am now firmly in the camp of “unlimited nesting” or else chronological.
Does it have to get narrower each reply or can all just be indented once to show a direct response?
This is so over my head but I am learning.
“Of course as Brad reminds, every computer is going to display only the fonts it has available.”
But if you can make them available, it _might_ become a good thing. I took a look at Tenor Sans and liked it, so I downloaded it here. It’s beautiful on Linux, and I’ve made it default. Then I transferred the .zip file (via USB) to Windows for design work there, and it doesn’t look so great. (It transferred fine, BTW.) I’ll work with it some more, but may have to get rid of it on Windows.
Another disadvantage of nesting, is that new responses can come in ABOVE the last post and be missed entirely, as I did on several of the responses above. The only solution to this is to review the entire thread each time, which I can learn to do.
I am now FIRMLY in the chronological camp but regardless Claire, your words, thoughts and posts are the most critical part. I can live with and appreciate, ANY which way but gone.
Nesting and serif, but a bit larger, but neither is a strong preference. Content is King, and yours is the best.
Why is it that I often feel the need to post right effin’ now, despite recognizing that I’ve been sitting too long, and it’s time to get out of the chair?
Like when you really, really, really need to use the restroom, and you know when you stand up your legs won’t take you there?
Or when you have to be somewhere, and you’re trying to convince yourself that it’s okay, all the lights will be green?
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to mention it before since the question was nesting v. chronological:
Disqus is the best commenting option. One reason I have no hair is that I used to use native commenting.
I like chronological comments, but it’s not a big issue to me as long as the nested replies never get to the point of being a single file, vertical line.
And, fonts don’t matter to me at all. I can adjust and adapt.
Regarding the previous contentious comments- I just unsubscribed as soon as I saw nothing constructive was going to come of it. It seemed healthier.
I think it depends on the font size. I’m looking at Tenor Sans now on the Google site, and it doesn’t seem to scale well. At 16 px many of the characters (e,b,d,o) look a bit wonky. But at 15 px that goes away and it’s fairly nice. It’s wonky again at 14 px.
There’s no Reply in Brad’s comment, so I don’t know where this will end up.
I did make the font bigger – I may have to make it bigger still. Also, I tend to jam my lines together in my own files, just to save space, so I may have to open the leading a little.
> Disqus is the best commenting option.
Oh, dear Gawd, please no.
> Like when you really, really, really need to use the restroom, and you know when you stand up your legs won’t take you there?
Ouch. I have yet to experience that one.
Chronological comments is my vote.
Keeping count, Claire ?! 🙂
I can put up with about any font unless it’s waaaay out there ridiculous.
Out of curiosity, what Linux are you using? I use Linux Mint 17.3 and 18 (Cinnamon) with Pale Moon, and the fonts here work fine for me. In fact, I’ve tested with Firefox, Chrome, and IE under Win 7 Pro and Android.
Debian 7. I am waaaay overdue to upgrade to Debian 8. I normally use PaleMoon, but Firefox and creaky old Opera 12.16 are no better. (Which doesn’t surprise me, as it’s the same OS rendering the fonts.)
I prefer chronological because of multithreading. My brain can accommodate that better than my tiny computer screen.
“Keeping count, Claire ?!”
LOL, trying to, Frank. But I’ll go back this evening and do a re-count. So far (counting a couple of v*tes received by email), people are slightly favoring chronological comments and mostly don’t give a hoot about whether the font is serif or sans, as long as it’s readable. So that’s good.
Pat and Brad — Thanks for testing fonts! Brad, I had no idea a font would go from wonky to unwonky to wonky again with so little provocation.
I’ve been playing around and my new favorite is Philosopher (https://fonts.google.com/?category=Sans+Serif&query=Philos) — which is very unusual and you’d think would be horrible at small point sizes. It looks surprisingly good, though. But of course that’s not a face many people are likely to have or want to install. Oh well.
I am far more likely to go with the WP default font Roboto (not the slab version, though maybe). It’s readable and everybody has something like it on their computer.
“Anyways, as an example, What’s the most readable font for the screen?”
Thanks, jed. That was interesting. Makes the WP default font, Roboto, look more appealing. And yeah, makes sense that onscreen reading and dead-tree reading would be so different.
I’m leaning toward chronological, but the nesting comments allowed for some good debate to continue without being chopped up (much easier to follow the responses) – though maybe that should be reserved for the forums?
So, are we going with the Peoples’ Font of Judea, or the Judean Peoples’ Font?
I know, “Splitter!”
Damn, Claire, where are you finding these fonts originally?! (The link to fonts/google doesn’t work for me, so I’ve had to go elsewhere to get them.) I wrote with Philosopher in Scribus and it can be positively elegant in a DTP document. It even looks great in MS Publisher. Now that I’ve got Tenor Sans figured out at the right size, I’m going to have fun with both of these. Thank you.
The funny thing, there really is a Judean Peoples’ Font.
Meet “Loretta”:
https://www.fontyukle.net/en/LORETTA+Regular.ttf
Like Pat, I don’t know where this will end up. What’s with the reply buttons?
Claire, I’ve tried Philosopher here, and it looks good at all point sizes. Well, everything below 11 px is hard to read, but it seems to be rendering ok. I hope WP uses at least 16 px, though 14 px is ok for my eyes.
Thank you, Brad R and Pat for checking out these fonts. I’m especially surprised that Philosopher looks good to you. I might have to give it a try here on the blog and see if it results in riots in the streets or anything.
I have no idea on the reply buttons. I didn’t change any settings and because I’m responding via the admin interface, I’m not seeing what you’re seeing (or … erm, not seeing). Will see if I can figure out what’s going on.
By the way, Claire, whatever you’re using right now also looks quite good on my system. Is the the WP default Roboto that you mentioned?
Nope. I went ahead and am trying out Philosopher since you and Pat vetted it so positively.
Good thing we can switch fonts with just the click of a button. 🙂
BTW, those reply buttons? They’re there when I look at the user interface, so I’m not sure why they’ve disappeared for anybody.
If you decide to go to chronological, it would help to have a timestamp along with the date in comments, so that if someone is responding to a prior comment, they can unambiguously refer to that particular comment.
Tip for the Zero Hedge / single column problem (and other kinds of goofiness when you’re just trying to read text): Turn off CSS – this can be done (in all the browsers I’m familiar with) by View menu / Style / None (or similar verbiage).
I use Safari on an iPhone, and I go single-column before a desktop page would, I think. There’re no CSS controls on this browser that I’ve found.
Safari / iPhone isn’t a browser I’m familiar with. It won’t offer ‘disable CSS’ but according to the following website, there is a way to ‘Disable Styles’, which is what you want:
http://iphone42u.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-view-websites-on-your-mac-that.html
“If you decide to go to chronological, it would help to have a timestamp along with the date in comments”
Good idea, trying2b. I was missing the date stamps myself. Just figured out how to add them and get them to display in the proper format. It was a learning experience. 🙁
Thanks for the effort, that link deals with the Mac desktop browser, even though the guy has “iPhone” in his blog URL 🙂
Don’t care much about fonts, though the current one is pretty.
Indented thread comments are nice if you read through them once. They make it hard, though, to find new comments on a later visit.
IIRC, my gravatar is a dragon.
Interesting. My browser seems to be substituting DejaVu Serif, I presume because I don’t have Philosopher installed. Nicely readable, though, so I’m happy.
Chronological and sans serif for me. And timestamps.
For anyone using Windows, it’s Word and Excel that do not handle Philosopher well; MS Publisher has it covered nicely. (Of course Word & Excel are their bread-and-butter, and Publisher is rarely used by people, [except me]. So much for Windows…) But it sure is pretty in my Linux computer, and very readable at size 11.
No input, just curious if my avatar shows up. 😉
And it does. How cool is that.
I prefer chronological. I can respond to a specific person by typing “@Claire” and list the timestamp.
If you go with nesting, offset the replies a bit more so they appear more obvious as replies.
That WAS quite a champagne christening you had the other day for your new blog, wasn’t it?
“That WAS quite a champagne christening you had the other day for your new blog, wasn’t it?”
🙂 It was. But a welcome one. I’d been disappointed a day earlier when some (admittedly less provocative) posts drew almost no comment. I knew going in that Vin’s opinions would rouse other opinions.
Anyhow, thanks for your v*tes, Vince and everybody.
Chronological commenting wins and I have just disabled nesting. The change in settings doesn’t appear to have affected existing comment threads (not yet, anyhow), but I’ll watch to make sure it takes effect on new ones.
Nobody seemed to care much about serif vs sans-serif, as long as the blog remained readable. So I chose a font that was odd, but worked. It’s called Philosopher (http://www.dafont.com/philosopher.font). If you don’t have it on your system, your computer will default to something else (Brad said Deja-Vu Serif on his system, which is common and nicely readable). Any complaints, please let me know. But if you want to see the blog’s typeface as intended, you can download the font for free.
I de-checked the nesting option. But comments are still nesting. This may be a job for He Who Fakes It Well.