I am getting a little frustrated with WordPress. I know, I’m using a free service and I really shouldn’t bitch about it so much, but it really bugs me that there are all these themes that are great if you want to look cool and edgy and show off lots of personality, but totally suck ass if you want people to be able to actually read your text without developing eyestrain.
What is so hard about serif fonts that aren’t dinky or light? Small, light, sans serif fonts are fine if you’re only subjecting people to two paragraphs a week about your cat. There are only two themes that really have decent, readable fonts, one of which is butt ugly if you don’t buy CSS customization and the other (Sapphire, the one I’m using was using at the time of this entry) doesn’t have sidebars on the individual post pages, just the main page (otherwise it’s perfect). The sidebar even has a Home link on it, even though it’s pretty much only going to show up at Home! Aaargh!
Anyhow, I’m trying to see whether the things that annoy me about Blogger annoy me less than the things that annoy me about WordPress, or if the WordPress folks will be kind enough to provide a theme for those of us who want to show off our content rather than just our really cool header images and fancy widgets. I’d just make do without the sidebar, but my stats show people coming in to read individual posts and since part of the purpose of this blog is to provide support for adoptees who’ve found a grave in their search, I’d really like to have some relevant links on every single page, plus maybe links to a few pages I could write up specifically for that purpose.
Then again, maybe everybody’s switching to Google Reader or some other RSS reader service or client and this won’t matter.
Anyhow, this is just a heads-up that a move might be in the works and a chance for me to vent some frustration. Also, if anyone can suggest some specific themes from the WordPress.org theme list (not the ones on WordPress.com, I’ve already gone through those, ick!) that I can request rather than the vague request I already made (a clean, light theme with dark, not teeny-tiny serif fonts and a persistent sidebar), I’d appreciate it.
iBastard 
“The sidebar even has a Home link on it, even though it’s pretty much only going to show up at Home! Aaargh!”
LOL!
I personally use Contempt. And each time I try to change to a theme with a dark background, I just feel that there is something wrong with what I see.
Good luck moving to Blogger!
Blogger is the devil, just change to cutline theme
I moved from Blogger to WordPress because I couldn’t stand Blogger. Bulky is the only word that comes to mind. I kept losing my stat counter (my own fault) and I like the built-in one on WordPress.
I always have to enlarge my text with my browser to read my own posts which is really stooopid. I also hate that I can’t put java or flash codes into my posts.
BUT I am another Blogger expat. I came to WordPress so I could password protect (Blogger may now have that option with their recent upgrade). Hated how long it was taking Blogger to make various upgrades. WordPress constantly upgrades in little bits while Blogger takes years to replace everything, and then all hell breaks lose. But they did send me a surprise sweatshirt after I paid for one upgrade. That was cool.
I do hate the lack of flexibility in the WordPress templates but if you throw a little money at them, you get to tweak the stuff that bugs you in the CSS files (if you understand CSS and I don’t really).
The biggest advantage to WordPress is that you can change templates without losing anything. The biggest advantage to Blogger is that you can go right into your code and play with it–but then if you change templates you lose everything. It just depends on how much tweaking you like to do, I guess.
I believe you can export your posts in either direction but when you change venues you will lose your comments and probably your images. Images can be replicated but comments, not so much.
Thanks for your input, Blogger expats! Yeah, Blogger just looks like a different set of chains, and possibly a more burdensome one. All my problems can be solved here by paying for the CSS customization upgrade, so maybe I will do that. It just surprises me how reader-unfriendly the themes are.
The Contempt and Cutline themes are both ones I’ve considered, and I actually ran this blog with Contempt for about a day before the font just bugged me too much and I switched back to Sapphire. Cutline has one of those fonts where the dash is shorter than the hyphen, and as a frequent (ab)user of the dash that really gets on my nerves
Well I think I’ll try K2-Lite for the time being and see how that goes. I’ll probably wind up customizing it to make the font more readable.
I realized that the font used in Contempt is really irritating (after reading my blog too many times 🙂 ), and I decided to change the theme. But when I viewed my blog using Windows Vista, the font seemed much better! Now, I’m not sure what to do.
I see that you are playing around with K2-Lite CSS. Keep us updated!
If I had to guess, I’d say that either Vista or whatever platform you’re using otherwise doesn’t have the specified font installed and it’s going to the next one in the font family, which either looks better or worse depending on which of the former is happening. I see you’re using K2-Lite now, too.
K2-Lite is actually pretty decent once the fonts are darkened. The CSS customization was worth buying just because I can change the little things I don’t like rather than having to drastically change the theme just because I’m unhappy over little stuff.
I do wish the K2-Lite CSS had been commented a little better, but it’s not too hard to figure out what’s going on.
Well, it turned out that it was the same font but IE 7 was displaying it more smoothly.
As you said, I am now using K2-Lite. It is not perfect but it will do for now. I have been thinking about buying a domain and hosting my blog there using WordPress (just like professional bloggers do: ) ). This way, I will be able to change anything that bugs me.
Meanwhile, I started a new blog… but in Arabic. First, I tried Blogger but its Arabic support was not good enough (right to left and stuff). So, I returned to WordPress and used the default theme which seems to support Arabic better than the other ones.
P.S. my comments on this post… I hope that they did not go too far!
Vista is a royal pain in the aahhhhhh….!
Beats me, I have Mac OS X.