I had to make some changes. (You can skip this paragraph if you want since it is just pointless rambling, I try to educate in the next one.) First off, I am using a static size for the layout. There is about a 12 pixel border around the page now if you are viewing the page in a maximised browser with a 1024x768 resolution. I also spent a little work making it look good on a 800x600 resolution (you get the content, but have to scroll for the side bar). While I don't have older versions of Internet Explorer, FireFox, or Opera, I did test in the more current versions and it looks similar if not the same in each (and none broken...at least on my computers). I have limited to 4 colors (ok, 5 because I have two medium greys in my pic, but close enough), hopefully the fonts will be as visible on other machines as they are on mine. I also didn't like the large amount of needless white space. Well, maybe not the needless white space, but the poor handeling of white space. This layout actually has a lot more white space but it does not shit on your eyes nearly as much.
Now, for all of those out there in TV land, I am going to give a quick explanation of White Space. Simply put, it is the unused space surrounding text, figures, and designs. It is easy to see the huge voids of space around this layout, but it might not be obvious why they are helpful. Seperation of information can help you both seperate individual thoughts and to add to general readability. Imagine reading a book where the text covered the page from margin to margin, no seperation for paragraphs, ends of sentences, or even between words, just a solid mass of text. The content would be so dense that it would be hard to garner anything inteligent from it. We can thank the Celtics around the time of 600-800 AD for giving us the space between words and the beginings of uppercase vs lowercase letter forms (technically the Romans got tired of the lack of space between words and started using dashes in there, which is kind of attributed to later becoming punctuation.).
Now, I have added a lot of white space in my layout. I have upped the margins of all the actual content to cause more of a seperation between invidual posts, titles, the top menu/banner area, and the navigation bar on the right. I would have liked the margin size on the left to be a little larger, but I was shooting for consistency accross browsers and some scale worse than others. The font size was increased in the content areas to make the increased margins remain a subconscience observation and to decrease the amount of text on a given line (12-14 words a line is optimal...I didn't make this up, start grabbing novels and counting words per line). The white space around the content is also proportional, which you might notice on the right bar. The text is smaller and it has a much smaller left margin. The size stresses that it really is not important to the content on the left and does not need to be absorbed with it. It can be pleasently ignored and treated as an after thought. However, the white space in the side bar is almost as consistant as the white space in the main area, each 'block' of information is seperated by an appropriate amount of space to show that they are indeed seperate.
Anyways, I am going to stop feigning intelligence here and finish up my post. There might be some small modifications to the layout, but nothing too huge. I hope you enjoy.
