Referring to the old look, she writes, "I understand why people are attracted to the elegant dark background with white letters. It looks pretty from a distance, but reading it is oppressive enough that you don't notice it while you're reading it, but you experience great relief when it's gone."

Irrespective of the colors... and I happen to run a darkish background... I've always though Ann's description fully applicable to Angry Andy's WRITING ITSELF....you experience great relief when it's gone.

One would think the Sitemeter is there purely for purposes of things like the TTLB Ecosystem. I'm sure TIME has their own vastly more expensive ways of keeping track of eyeballs.

As to the "reverse" type (white on blue background), that's a tale as old as the design hills, and the fact that sullivan got away with abusing his readers' eyeballs for so long is a testament to his drawing power. Sometimes function trumps form.

It's one thing to beg for money and slum it when you're only pulling in a hundred grand or so from begathons, but it's ludicrous to be slumming it with freebie blog tools when you're playing with multibillion-dollar company money.

Amazing what a redesign will do for a site, even if it has the same whiny self-serving content.

You'd think that after he'd raised all those hundreds of thousands of dolalrs, he would have spent some of it on webdesign.

You would think that he could have spend some of the near $100K he got from his fundraising drives to get a better design! I could not stand the blue background, and have to select the white background just to make it readable to my eyes.