licentious radio

Thursday, August 1, 2002
[12:44:00 PM]

Licentious Radio is proud to announce our new Typography channel. In addition to commentary here, check out draft essays at my other website:
Typography Manifesto
Type Boom

And more explicitly web-oriented:
Web Typography
Link text usability
Print Stylesheets: the Wrong Approach
Using Cascading Stylesheets

Note that the Cascading Stylesheets essays fill some details missing from Web Typography, which is a rather old essay.

[10:01:14 AM]

Our grassroots movement to launch Dave Winer into orbit is picking up steam. The latest donation is from a guy in the "I want Dave off the planet, ASAP" category. Only $9,999,962.50 to go. We take donations via paypal. Please hurry, because space on the space station is limited (as strange as that might seem).

[9:44:46 AM]

Wee! We're a syndicated columnist. At least the text column of our RadioRadio is syndicated [syndic8.com]. We're just not sure how it happened. Alas, our slick css-only rollover example don't roll at syndic8. Also confusing is that syndic8 doesn't show our key "licentious radio" branding. (But then, neither does the RadioRadio page. Oh, well. This is still just a hobby.)

We've also been translated by google. Such an honor. Alas, machine translation leaves a little to be desired: "Leider für den Rest von uns, war Fitts über seinen drei-bewaffneten Zustand sehr schüchtern, also wurde er nie in Öffentlichkeit gesehen, oder irgendein besonders gescheiter HCI-Wissenschaftler konnte gewesen sein führen, um Gesetz Fittss zu fragen." (From Fitts's Law.)

In other news, licentious radio is rising to the top of the Google charts. Search for "cheney threatened investigation fbi bush september 11 and we're number 4! Everybody quick point to us (there). We're going for utter dominance.

[9:41:34 AM]
The classic post that made licentious radio the media giant it is today:

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').