Pearsonified

This is just lovely and very well-timed for people starting new year's resolution blogs next month :) Congratulations to the author. Would supplement it with this: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography.php And the super-handy related tool: http://www.pearsonified.com/typography/

Recommended Tool: Golden Ratio Typography Calculator http://www.pearsonified.com/typography/

I'm on OSX/Chrome21, and it is quite hard to read for me as well. In addition to exploring other font options, I would recommend you play with the `line-height` css property to give the text some breathing room! In the article "Secret Symphony: The Ultimate Guide to Readable Web Typography" [1] the author covers `line-height`, line width, proportions, and stresses the importance of getting typography right for to your readers. The article then goes into some golden ratio stuff, which may be a little more than you are interested in, but give it a look! [1]: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography.php

There's also this: https://pearsonified.com/truth-about-thesis-com/

There's a lot of back-story here but the tl;dr is that someone did some really shady stuff with GPL themes and was a jerk to Matt and the community. Full stop. He admits as much. The other side is that... years later, Matt spent $100,000 just to spite the developer by buying the domain he wanted. Imagine spending six figures just to spite someone. That's a lot of meals for hungry school kids. This is really scary behaviour for anyone. Let alone the leader of a community. https://pearsonified.com/truth-about-thesis-com/

His reputation wasn't exactly sterling before: https://pearsonified.com/truth-about-thesis-com

I lost a lot of respect for Matt Mullenweg in this fiasco. This comment in particular: http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.php#comment… Pursuing the trademark cancellation further is just downright vindictive. It's not too late for him, to say, "I f-ed up and I've let this blind my decision making. I've asked the legal team to rescind the trademark dispute and we won't pursuing this any further." Until that happens, this cloud will continue to hover over Matt and the WP community.

"During that debate, I got defensive and acted like an asshole. At the time, I was woefully ignorant about software licensing, and I felt as though I was being backed into a corner and asked to accept something I didn’t fully understand. Instead of handling it in a measured, polite manner, I was a jerk. I made a mistake, and I paid dearly for it." This something to keep in mind, stay calm. When you are agitated you don't think straight. What I don't understand is why Mullenweg and Pearson don't work together and increase the size of the market? Having read this article, http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.php#more-10… now I see why.

I suppose directing your 384-employee company to spend $100,000+ and a whole lot of lawyer-hours getting revenge over a personal grudge is a benefit of keeping the company private and closely held. Mr. Pearson wrote things up from his point of view this month as well: http://www.pearsonified.com/2015/07/truth-about-thesis-com.php

Agree on the importance of line height—here's a calculator to help give a balanced line height—I'll add to the post. http://www.pearsonified.com/typography/

I very much agree. Line height, line width, and font size, are the 3 elements of a body of large text that must be balanced. There is some basic arithmetic to this, and it appears everyone seems to ignore it. (HN's design is a perfect example of the 'meh' attitude toward readability.) I think this article does a good job of visually explaining this balance and how to accomplish it: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography.php

Their article pane resizes to an extent, but I assume it stops expanding after a certain size because they don't want to exceed an optimal width for readability [1]. Without being able to see it on your monitor, can't tell for sure. [1]: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography.php

You can use the golden ratio to find an "optimal" value for the ratio between line height, line width and font size: http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography.php http://www.pearsonified.com/typography/ But of course the line height should be in relative units, not in px: http://webtypography.net/rhythm_and_proportion/vertical_motion/2.2.1/

Actually, I have seen that - one of our websites got infected with a particular hack that did this to our Google cache and search results. They redirect search engines to the fake pharmacy pages, while still leaving regular users able to see the normal content. This has been happening a lot, especially on self-hosted Wordpress blogs, it seems. If you're interested, I decoded the hack on my server and posted the translated source online: https://bitbucket.org/arianb/pharmahack/src More details here: http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/04/wordpress-pharma-hack.php

Matt, If it's a WordPress Hack which I'm sure it is. Here's the solution: http://www.pearsonified.com/2010/04/wordpress-pharma-hack.php Can we not ask them to remove their site from Google that seems like drastic errancy as it takes months and sometimes longer for reinclusion requests to go through. Seems like a hasty and unneccesary methodology to the problem.

If there's one consistent issue that plagues startups, consultants, and even large established business it's marketing. And that whole thread touches on a subject that I wish would get more traction here on HN: content engineering. Content Engineering (building tools and useful online software projects) is an incredibly effective way to build an audience and awareness by helping people instead of writing yet another 500 word blog post or dumping six figures of VC money into FB or Google ads. It honestly feels like cheating. I think tools just occupy a different part of people's brains than articles and certainly a different spot than ads. This is a hot topic for me as I was looking through the analytics for my site yesterday and found that our Subject Line tester [1] was driving about 10x the traffic of our dozen 2000+ word carefully crafted and educational blog posts [2]. F'ing ridiculous 1 - https://sendcheckit.com/email-subject-line-tester 2 - https://sendcheckit.com/blog Here's some other good examples: Clearbit's Logo API https://clearbit.com/logo ForAGoodStrftime https://www.foragoodstrftime.com Atom https://atom.io/ Golden Ratio Typography Calculator https://pearsonified.com/typography/