licentious radio

Saturday, March 23, 2002
[4:52:59 PM]

CSS tip: Make your blog easier to read! The single best thing you can do with stylesheets is to add a little extra space between your lines of text.

The simplest approach: put a <div> with the style information around the content part of your template. Radio inserts the body of the page at the <%bodytext%> macro. So adding this to your Radio template (Click on Preferences, then Main template) would look something like:

<div style='line-height: 1.5'>

<p><%bodytext%></p>

</div>

What number should you use for the line-height? 1.5 is good for rather long lines. 1.2 is good for rather short lines.

This works in new browsers that support stylesheets. Browsers that don't know about stylesheets will just ignore it. Stylesheets are something of a problem for Netscape 4, but line-height works pretty well (as long as you use a relative measure like '1.5').

[12:33:01 PM]
One thing that's fun about Radio is that you can see where some of the traffic for your site comes from. For example: "Referer rankings for licentious radio."

I'd wish for this feature to evolve. It doesn't actually list the http referer headers that have hit webpages on your site. Instead, Radio adds a javascript doc.write web bug to your pages. I don't understand the advantage of that approach if you control the server. The server log itself has better information than what you get with this web bug approach. And the web bug only works if the browser has javascript and it's enabled.

The other problem is that you don't see hits where people have bookmarked your site. A lot of people reading web logs have bookmarks to the pages they visit regularly.