How To Annoy Readers of Your Feed

Saturday-MorningI’ve done a lot of reading and research on web design and presentation (yeah you probably can’t tell that…I didn’t say I knew how to do a whole lot with it yet–and for those who care, I’m actually having a new template designed by the fabulous Christine over at CYHAssociates).   Over at A Field of Paper Flowers, I changed themes on an almost quarterly basis.  Always looking for the one that fit.  One of the myriad of reasons I switched to self hosted WordPress is that I had access to oodles more themes.  One thing I consistently read was that it’s better to have a light background with dark text.  Black on white.  Everyone says it’s easier to read.  I don’t tend to agree on that point (I like light on dark), but as I don’t want to be the sole reader of my blog, I went with it.

For the blogs I read on a daily basis, I am a huge fan of bloglines.  It really saves me a lot of time by letting me know what’s been updated.  It then pops the post up in your classic black text on white background.  UNLESS the author of the post has deliberately selected a specific color for the text of the post himself instead of using the “automatic” color setting.  That’s what happened this morning as I was trolling through my bloglines.  One of the blogs I read had posted in YELLOW text.  This color.  See how hard that is to read on white? So I had to click out and go to the blog itself, which is a very well put together template that has a black background.  Yellow shows up beautifully on black.  It’s not that it was a difficult or time consuming thing to click over to the host blog.  It’s not that I don’t do that already for the ones that don’t show the entire post in the feed (many don’t in order to cut down on splogs and such).  But for days when I’m short on time, it’s that kind of thing that makes me just say “forget it” and move on to the next post rather than making the extra effort.  Which is not to say that they’re having any great loss in my not reading their post.  But if more people are like me (and I suspect that they are), then it begins to make a difference.

2 thoughts on “How To Annoy Readers of Your Feed

  1. Oops, I think one of our blog posts was the culprit with the yellow font this week–we’ve fixed it now. 😯 Thanks for the alert! I didn’t know about that yellow-on-white issue being a problem with feeds.

    Isn’t the Internet great! We wouldn’t have known about the feed-display issue unless I’d been subscribed to your blog and had it brought to my attention that way. And so the instant-communication and learning process continues!

  2. No big 😀 I have certainly been a culprit of that myself in the past. Particularly when I’ve changed themes and the font color didn’t change with it, so people couldn’t read the old posts.

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