Sometimes it’s a good idea to watch over someone’s shoulder while they’re visiting your website. If you find yourself pointing at their screen and saying things like, “the link! click the link!” and “what are you, grayscale-blind?” – as I did yesterday – you might want to consider a redesign.

My aversion to the underscore can be traced back to my days working alongside an old-school hot-metal-era typesetter, who would look over my shoulder and offer such helpful tips as, “yeah, we would never do that in my day.” One of the many nuggets of typesetting wisdom that he imparted to me was the fact that there is no good reason to underscore. And as a tribute to his tutelage, I’ve tried to carry that aesthetic over to my web design – with somewhat predictable results.

So witness please, my first design-driven (rather than purely utilitarian) Blosxom flavour. I suspect there is a tidier way to do it with CSS rather than tables, but the urgency inspired in me as a result of the realisation that the difference between #444444 and #000000 was not nearly drastic enough for most casual observers to distinguish between the muffin that is the text and the blueberries that are the links demanded that I work quickly with simple, familiar code, and leave the business of teaching myself new tricks for another day.