We have had our web experience controlled by the sites we visit for so long that for a lot of us, the web browser defaults no longer even come in to play when controlling what the text on a web page looks like, except in the case where we want to override whatever choice the site we are visiting has made.

This isn’t a rant. I actually think, by and large, that this is a good thing. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) allows precise control over the overall look of web sites, and when you are trying to walk that line between clean and detailed, CSS can be the razor that keeps your site from looking too busy or too cluttered. There are many precise tweaks that can enhance the presentability of a site, like the vertical spacing between lines of text.

But, as you have no doubt noticed, this site doesn’t employ CSS to force a particular font type, size, style, or color. Those are all left up to the choices you have made in your browser settings, and if you are anything like me, you probably haven’t even looked at your browser font defaults for years.

Then end result? 10-point Times New Roman, with blue unvisited links and purple visited links.

If you absolutely hate serif fonts (fonts that have little twiddly bits on the letters like Times New Roman), take a moment to go in to your settings and select a different font that is more pleasing. You can choose any font that you have installed, from Helvetica (or Arial for you Windows folks) to something more exotic like Calibri on Windows (the new MS Office default font) to Monaco on the Mac.

All the browsers except Chrome have a font setting in their options. Google Chrome, created with minimalism in mind, forces you to edit a configuration file to change your font defaults. I found where this configuration resides from a Chrome Help Discussion Board:

Using text editor to open:
   ...\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local Settings
   \Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

You will find the "webkit": {  "webprefs": { in the file.
Those settings are for WebKit.

In my setting example:
   "webkit": {
      "webprefs": {
         "default_fixed_font_size": 11,
         "default_font_size": 12,
         "fixed_font_family": "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono",
         "minimum_font_size": 12,
         "minimum_logical_font_siz": 12,
         "sansserif_font_family": "Times New Roman",
         "serif_font_family": "Arial",
         "standard_font_is_serif": false,
         "text_areas_are_resizable": true
      }
   }

The minimum_font_size and minimum_logical_font_size prevent Chrome to use
very small font size for display.

Remember to close Chrome first before you edit the file, or the file you saved
will be overwritten by Chome after exiting.

If Google Chrome has the most annoying default font configuration, Safari 4 possibly has the best.  Not only is it easy to find, but if you are viewing a page that uses the default browser font (like this one) selecting a font will immediately update the page with that font, allowing you to see immediately if it’s a good choice or not.

Of course, as more and more sites adopt CSS-heavy themes in an attempt to give you a unique and identifiable look, these settings become less relevant. Maybe that’s the lesson we can take away about Chrome – they’ve already decided that default fonts should be set once (by the developer) and forgotten.

This year, for the first time, I went to the Penny Arcade Expo.  It was actually a surprise gift from my wife, for our 1 year wedding anniversary.  As I whiled away the days that led up to PAX, I grew more excited.  The last (and actually, first) conference I went to was SXSW Interactive, so I wasn’t completely sure how it was going to play out.

Although I didn’t do a whole lot of preparation, I did download the PDF that showed the locations of the conference rooms and other special events, as well as the panel schedule.  I identified several panels that looked interesting to me and planned on getting there early the first day to register.

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Have you ever gotten excited about a product from a new startup, used it a bit, and then wandered off when it didn’t quite do what you wanted it to, or perhaps you you were using something already that is just slightly better?

That happens to me all the time.

But the great thing about most startups are their agility and drive to succeed.  If you take your eye off of them for a moment, when you re-visit them it seems like a whole lot of great new things happened during your absence.  Contrast this to some big, established web application companies where you are lucky to get a great new feature once a quarter or so.

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It appears that I am behind with my weekly update on the RSS Reset project.  This is probably going to be my last update on this project, and in my last paragraph I’ll make an effort to determine if I felt it was a success or not.

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Recently, I wrote about an update to RSSmeme where the developer, Benjamin Golub, had added FriendFeed as a source to track shared stores.  Just tapping in to this API gave his app an instant crawl speed increase, recognition of shares would start to appear within minutes instead of hours.

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Good Morning scribkin readership!

If you operate a blog, and that blog supports sending a trackback, I have a simple request for you.  I have adjusted the trackback URL on this article to point to (what I think) the Disqus service will use.

Next time you post, please include a link to this article (no need to link to anything other than the standard article URL) and we will see if the Disqus trackback feature works as advertised.

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