The Usenix Annual Technical Conference starts next week in Monterey. This is probably the World's geekiest venue. I'll be there, wearing my sysadmin cap the whole week.

Before flying to California, I've tried on a pair of Web Designer glasses though, so as not to forget all I've learned these past 4 months.

Taking a look at s l a m's home page wearing those, I noticed the new outline design had too much bold styled text for good readability.

Bold titles are great when separating paragraphs, or posts within the same day. But it's confusing when all titles are listed with no text in between, which is what happens for all collapsed posts.

This was easy to fix, with a new site preference, and a little Javascript code leveraging the W3C DOM level 2 CSS API, with its style property.

If you look at s l a m's home page now, you'll notice that titles appear in bold only when posts are expanded. Try the 'latest' widget in the right sidebar to see their style change.

I've of course moved all this to the activeRenderer tool. So when I release it (real close now thanks to Simone and his team's work on the register.xml-rpc.it service), you'll be able to do the same, with the change of a single preference.