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Lorelle, beautiful sans-serifs installed on OS X by default include Lucida Grande, Futura, Optima, and Helvetica Neue (a newer version of Helvetica). You may also like Gill Sans or Impact.

If you like one of those, try the opposite of what Root suggested — for example, {font-family: “Futura”, “Trebuchet MS”, sans-serif;}. That way Mac users get Futura (Macs usually also have Trebuchet MS, which is why you should put the Mac-only font before it in the list), Windows users get Trebuchet MS (IMO the most beautiful sans-serif on most Windows systems), and after that it’s up to the browser.

Oh, and by the way, Geneva is a bad font to specify. You may think you’re catering for Mac users by using it, but you’re not. Geneva was designed to look good without anti-aliasing at either 9px or 10px; but nowadays 9px and 10px are often too small to read (I have my minimum font size set to 16px, for example), and Geneva is even uglier than Arial at any other size. Please don’t use it.

This is great, Lorelle. There is one error I’d like to correct, though. You say that with {font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, sans-serif}, “if that font isn’t on the user’s computer, the system default shows up which is often Courier.”

That is not correct. If Trebuchet MS is not on the user’s computer, the browser will choose another sans-serif font that *is* available on the user’s computer. That’s what the “sans-serif” part of that rule is for!

In Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, and MacIE you can choose your preferred sans-serif font in the browser prefs; in other browsers (such as WinIE) the browser has its own internal list of sans-serif fonts. Either way, you’ll never get Courier.

Personally when I want a sans-serif font I just use {font-family: sans-serif}. That way if you’re a Firefox, Mozilla, MacIE, or Opera user, I’ll be using what you’ve chosen as your favorite sans-serif font. I think that’s most polite.

This has often been asked for before (examples: 1, 2, 3), but Matt thinks it is a silly idea (partly because his own site has occasionally had highly informative comments added to very old posts.) Perhaps he’ll change his mind once his site has been running for 20 or 30 years (or perhaps by then we’ll have mechanisms to better simulate real-world conversation, so replying to an old utterance is more “difficult” than replying to a new one).
Meanwhile, GamerZ has produced a hack for what you want, and so has davidhouse.

danes75, you missed the worst part about my unfinished design — the calendar’s broken! You’re wrong about the “boring font selection”, though; if it shows up as boring in your browser, its your browser preferences that are boring. And you’re wrong about the comments window — read what I said more closely. (Or try it yourself: click “Comments” links on two unrelated Movable Type Weblogs.)
The one thing you’re right about is the word count. It’s intended to help people see how long it will take to read the item, without actually opening it, just like you can see how long a book will take to read by how thick it is. But it is a bit overdone. Hopefully I’ll find some simple graphical way of showing it instead, then the word count can be relegated to alt text for the graphic.

You can add adjust the <h1>‘s padding to effectively change the position of the text relative to the background.
For example, if your graphic is 100px high and you want the bottom-left corner of the heading to be inset 10px horizontally and vertically from the bottom left corner of the image, you could have:<pre>
h1 {
background: green url(images/green-leaves.jpg) no-repeat bottom left;
height: 100px;
width: 100%;
padding-bottom: 10px;
padding-left; 10px;
}
</pre>
(Caveat: I haven’t tried this code myself.)

In BBEdit Lite (and I assume in BBEdit too), you can open the “Text Options” dialog and choose “Show Spaces” and/or “Show Invisibles”. These options are also available from the text options menu in the toolbar.

You can put any HTML you like (your menu, pictures, introductory text, whatever) in the index.php document. If you want something to appear between the main heading and the Weblog entries, for example, you’d put it between the </h1> and the <?php if ($posts).

Ok, done, along with a suggestion for fixing it. (No configurability necessary!)

Matt, other examples include permalinks on article pages, a site’s privacy policy, accessibility statement, copyright notice etc, as well as any section navigation (e.g. “About”, “Archives”, Contact”) on individual Weblogs. As usual, doing the right thing is hard and doing the wrong thing is easy (which is why so many Web sites have this problem), so a general function to make context-sensitive links easier would save a lot of grief (for readers, not for the people implementing it).
notthatugly, if I want a link that doesn’t do anything, I’ll go to a site constructed for exactly that purpose. ?? I don’t see why every Weblog should have one by default. (Riddle for today: If removing a non-functional link counts as a “feature”, does that mean having a non-functional link counts as lacking a feature?)

(Full disclosure: This was an experiment to see how productive it would be to report usability bugs on the forums rather than by e-mail. Oh well.)

Yes, I know the header doesn’t change. That’s the bug. The header should be smarter than that.
And yes, I know it’s not that big of a deal, if your age is less than ~55 and your IQ is greater than ~110. However, that does not prevent it from being a bug for everyone else.

Before I came across this thread, I was going to make a request w.r.t. licenses.
Most of my entries will be available under one particular Creative Commons license (haven’t decided exactly which, yet). However, from time to time an entry of mine will be adapted from one or more <cite>Wikipedia</cite> articles, so I will have to provide it under the GNU Free Documentation License.
To pick a more mundane example, if someone republishes the Declaration of Independence on their Weblog, but their template claims that it’s under another license (even a Creative Commons one), they’re breaking the law.
Therefore, I think that:
(1) the license for an entry should be set the same way Comments/Trackbacks are — a default setting that can be changed for individual entries;
(2) the license should not be restricted to Creative Commons licenses.
Thanks, Chris!

(Okay, who was the bright spark who decided not to support HTML entities in the comments? ?? )

Parts 1~3 are complaining about the existence of Sturgeon’s Law: as Weblog tools get easier to use, the 90 percent of us who write crap are represented more and more. Complaining about that is about as useful as complaining about gravity.
Part 4 is mistaking a feature for a bug: Weblogs make communication more inefficient, which is the only long-term method of reducing spam.
Part 5 I agree with — the only point in calling Weblogs “blogs” is to make them more obscure.
Parts 6 and 7 are just masturbation on the author’s part. Without passing laws, you can’t decide what people will and won’t do on the Web.