Font sizes when site is viewed in aggregator

[incognit0]

Hi,

I have been enjoying building my site with your great setup.

I am creating a podcast and want to get into RSS readers to reach a wider audience. My font choices seem to produce inconsistent results when viewed in newreaders like Netnewswire (too small to be legible). Increasing the size in Blogharbor and refreshing the newsreader makes no difference. When I post from audioblog.com though the default size is fine, and displays like veryone elses.

Can you tell me what the best general font settings for my blog are? I don't want very large text on the page, but would like a balance between appearence and legibility.

Thanks

[john]

Aggregators in general do not display your articles with the same styles used by your blog, as the stylesheet information is not carried along as part of the RSS feed.

I use Netnewswire and when I view blogs with this aggregator they all are displayed in the same font; generally the aggregator will choose the font when the article does not specify it... Netnewswire allows you to choose a style:

http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/features/styles.php

I just checked out your blog and your RSS feed in Netnewswire, and my only suggestion would be to use the default font in all your posts, and only change the bold or italics etc. of an article posting. This way, you can use CSS stylesheets to change the font globally for all of your posts. If you start specifying the font, then that will take precedence over any global CSS changes.

This thread:

http://forums.blogharbor.com/viewtopic.php?t=518

talks about making global changes to your default article font. Again, these changes will effect your blog postings only when viewed on the weblog itself, not when it is viewed in an aggregator as they usually use their own stylesheets.

[incognit0]

Thanks..

I still have questions. I implemented (hopefully correctly) the CSS stylesheet code you suggested. Is there a way to remove all of my previous formatting in the RTE editor back to the now default CSS?

It seems the formatting for font and size is attached to the individual posts that I set in the RTE editor when I originally posted them, is this the case? If so, how can I now remove this formatting so that all my posts will display the new default?

Sorry if this is unclear. My understanding is limited, and my brain is in Monday morning mode!

Thanks.

http://dissidentvox.blogware.com/blog

[john]

If you have added any font formatting to an article, that will override anything set in your CSS. You'll need to go in and modify the posts individually.

One way to go about this would be to access the Edit Article page in your blog control panel for the article in question, then click the Display Mode button to toggle between Source and Display mode. If you can see the places in your HTML where the font is specified, you can remove it. That might not be easy, though, since the code might not be easily recognizable especially in longer articles.

Another technique would be to copy the text out of the Edit Article window in your blog control panel, and paste it into a text editor (a text editor, not a word processor like MS Word). Once pasted into the text editor, the characters lose their style information. Then you select the text in the text editor, and copy. Move back to the Edit Article page, and delete all of the text in the article so it is blank. Paste the text back in, and it will have lost all of the previous formatting.

Your article will now have shed any of the overrides, and will be displayed with the default font specified in your CSS. The drawback is you will have lost any of the special HTML formatting you have applied, including links, so you'll need to re-apply them. Keep a copy of the original HTML handy so you can be sure that you have any links you might need.

A great text editor for Mac users is TextWrangler 2 which has just been made free:

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

Hope this helps.