Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

4/22/2007


(Text) Size is Everything When It Comes to Start Pages

For years I have used two start pages to organize my internet activities.  The Home Place, my hand made page, and My Yahoo.  I have tinkered with Netvibes a little as well.  But I prefer the tradional My Yahoo look and feel to the Ajaxy look and feel of Netvibes and its newer competitors.

The biggest reason why is text size.  My primary monitor is a 24 inch Dell running at 1900 x 1200.  Most pages look really good.  But the text size on Netvibes is tiny.  Less than tiny.  Sub-tiny.  Until recently, text size on My Yahoo was fine.

But My Yahoo has been moving towards the Ajaxy look over the past year or so.  Now the new beta has moved the rest of the way.  My Yahoo's new look is very similar to Netvibes.  Including the sub-tiny text size (the clip to the left is the actual size).  In fact, thanks to My Yahoo's decision to run back to the pack, Netvibes has a cleaner, neater look.  It's an easy to implement stock portfolio module away from being the better choice.

But the text sixe problem needs to be fixed.

These applications need to give users a way to permanently set the text size, preferably at the module level.  Sure, I can change text size at the browser level, but that makes every other page look too big.

The first one of these applications to give me a way to permanently set text size will become my primary start page.  I suspect there are scads of other baby boomers like me who also want and need this feature.

I don't understand why it doesn't exist.

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Posted by Kent @ 4/22/2007 05:24:00 PM | Permalink

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4 Comment(s):

As I get older I get more and more irritated by this kind of thing. My pet peeves are "artistic" dark blogs, which you cannot read, small fonts and most annoying, those codes you have to fill in to post comments, some of which are a complete guess. We all get very used to ways of looking at things and part of my motivation for reading a site is whether I can read it easily.

By Blogger Colin Campbell, at 4/22/2007 6:27 PM  
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Kent,
Can you change that font size in using your browser? For example, on Firefox, View -> Text Size -> Increase or does that not work with the Ajaxy stuff?

By Anonymous Mike, at 4/23/2007 10:55 AM  
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I've been using a browser call "Omniweb" (Mac) that allows perferences per web site/page. You can set the text zoom level one time and then anytime you visit the site it automatically adjusts to that preset level.

It doesn't address the base problem, but it's a really great feature.

By Anonymous earl, at 4/23/2007 4:50 PM  
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Mike, it works and that's what I do. But it's not a good solution, because then other pages look too big until I go back to smaller font.

Earl, I wish there was a plugin for Firefox that did that. I can't believe there isn't.

By Blogger Kent, at 4/23/2007 7:38 PM  
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