Blog Housekeeping – nothing to see here
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Oh hi there. It seems you have snuck onto the blog right as I was doing some minor maintenance. The code above is a “technorati claim code”, which is something I need to put into the MMM RSS feed so that the obscure “technorati” service will recognize this blog as belonging to me. Why do I care about this? I don’t, really, it’s just one of those things website owners do to ensure the tentacles of the world wide web properly embrace your blog and you appear a bit higher on the various lists of “top 100 personal finance blogs”.
In other news, we fancied up the the typography on this site a little bit last night. It was formerly using the default “Helvetica” font for article bodies, but that’s an old Sans Serif font that looked a little bit cheap to me. I was quite fond of the font my Internet friend Sean uses on his stylish and intelligent Renewable Wealth blog, so I asked him last night what it was called, and he replied immediately with the secret code. “Georgia”. So that’s what you’re reading right now. When I see my words printed in this font, they are much closer to the way I imagine them in my head, so I think that’s an improvement.
Finally, we added a neat automatic forum snapshot tool in the right sidebar. It takes the five latest forum posts, and tantalizes you with their titles. If you hover your mouse pointer over the title, a little preview of the text pops up. This should encourage future readers to head over to check out the action-packed forum even after the forum announcement is long gone from this front page.
Blog writing is an interesting challenge, because you must always write for your dearest friends, the people who have been reading for many months or even since the beginning. You don’t want to bore them with endless repetition of things you’ve already said (unless you’re Dave Ramsey). But at the same time, 40% of the readers are brand new with every month due to the “everything is always subject to exponential growth” nature of the Internet. So you have to simultaneously write everything with new readers in mind. It is probably a good form of exercise for the mind.
Have a great Thursday. It’s a beautiful sunny day here in Colorado, so I’m attempting to make it a computer-and-phone-free day. Obviously I have failed, but it’s only 10AM so there is much time outdoors to be salvaged!
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Mr. Money Mustache is a family man living in the United States who retired from work, relatively wealthy, at about age 30. After several years of retirement, he noticed that his still-working peers were envious of his lifestyle. They were making more money than he ever had, yet they were somehow still broke. So he decided to write this blog to educate the world on how it is done.
LOL @ “Unless you’re Dave Ramsey”
If you think of Dave Ramsey as a motivational speaker instead of a financial adviser, a lot of what he does makes more sense.
But yeah, he is repetitive haha.
The new Georgia font is a bit smaller than the previous font. Perhaps you could make it a point or two larger.
Also, fonts with serifs are easier to read and lead to less confusion between the letters, so people can read the letters more efficiently. So any “sans serif” fonts take longer for the brain to process and read.
hit ctrl and = in your browser a couple of times and it will make the whole page more readable.
or hit “command” and “=” if you’re on a mac
Yep, didn’t you know 16pt was the new 12pt? ;)
That Technorati thing is odd. Don’t they usually just have a meta tag you can insert into your header so that you don’t have to do something as disruptive as putting it in an actual blog post?
I dig the new typography.
I’m still really new to blogging but I’m coming to the realization more and more that blogging is probably equal parts entertaining and informing.
If you post 3 times a week, that’s 156 posts a year. That’s a shit-ton of content so you kinda have to revisit topics as the years go by. At least, that’s the sense I’m getting.
I really don’t like reading serif fonts on screen. I’d have preferred that you stay with helvetica.
Helvetica has a rich history, you shouldn’t be so quick to knock it (and I don’t think it’s ever considered cheap). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica
If you are using Windows (or a more Mustachian Linux or FreeBSD), it’s unlikely you have Helvetica installed precisely due to the cost of the font. Most of the time these systems will use something garish like Arial – which is, in fact, a cheap knock off of Helvetica.
Helvetica is also one of the few fonts (if not the only) with a documentary.
Nice to know! It is interesting to learn a bit more about the rich history of typography.
To correct my sentence in this post, I should probably say that the Helvetica displayed on my MS Windows and Apple browsers looked cheap, compared to this nice Georgia we’re rocking right now.
That Helvetica documentary is worth watching. Yep, not just a frugalist, also a nerd.
“You don’t want to bore them with endless repetition of things you’ve already said (unless you’re Dave Ramsey).”
ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!
There is a good documentary about the Helvetica font. I watched it a month ago and thought it was fascinating.
For those with Netflix:
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Helvetica/70076125?trkid=2361637
MMM, I did the technorati claim thing as well. Genius of you to turn it into an actual post. I just suffered through the few hours while they crawled my blog with that absolute jibberish code sitting there.
“It’s a beautiful sunny day here in Colorado, so I’m attempting to make it a computer-and-phone-free day.”
I just had an epiphany. More than anything else, this is what I want as many days as possible. This is another huge benefit of retiring (or getting out of elec. engineering, at least)
Even your almost meaningless posts are sprinkled with hidden mustachean wisdom.
Thanks Brave. Hopefully your blog doesn’t take off too much more, since that always provides a strong temptation to sit back down at the computer! But these are real people we’re talking to, and I meet them in real life regularly. So I view it as an investment in a big fun social network for us all to surf around in during our extended retirment, rather than just a computer habit.
Also, you might want to add the correct spelling of “Mustachian” to your spell-checker :-)
Lol I love this post. Hilarious way to turn it into an actual post since you have to post it!