I know a lot of people who read this blog read it in an aggregator, and of course that's very cool. We support RSS here, as I'm sure you know.

But if you do, you might want to click this link and have a look at the home page, because there's a new header here. It's notable not just because it looks good, but it's text, not a graphic.

I knew when I saw Google Web Fonts that I was going to use it, but it took a bit of experimentation and thinking to figure out how. It's always a good idea to let things settle-in a bit before moving. Your first intuition is not always so good. But after a while, you figure it out.

It's very simple, which is of course how these thing should be.

There's just a link in the head section of the HTML, that gets the font from Google's website.

And then a style that defines it. After that, it's just a <p> in divHeaderText, which I've given a style.

As I got this working, I did it in a more general way in the worldoutline software, so you can use text headers on any page, using whatever font and size you like. (I use Fontdiner Swanky both here and there because I like it so much. It's friendly and wacky yet very readable. A nice informal headline font, imho.)

So this is nice, but it's still just a beginning. A foot in the door. I want to make this site a showcase for the tasteful use of fonts, because I love text, but I love it even more when it looks beautiful.

And since I often gripe about Google here, let me say thanks for putting some cool technology out there. Keep up the good work!

PS: Since all this is certain to change at some time in the future, I took a screen shot so future readers can know what I'm talking about.

PPS: I used fonts in the popup dialog in Blork. Movin right along!

Update: I changed the HTML and the stylesheet so that the header is an <h1> instead of a <p>. This was suggested in a comment by Drew Kime as the semantically correct thing to do. I agree. I'm starting to feel semi-confident about my CSS. In fact, yesterday I switched over a table-based layout to a completely CSS-based one. And it's better this way. Oy I feel like I'm becoming a Believer. Please stop me.

 8/22/2011; 8:11:42 AM.   .