I'll check out that readability thing in a sec, but I want to say a big wrod to this:

if we reduce the Verdana to 10 point, and also the courier that the quotes are in, I will no longer be able to read the courier quotes.

I find that. If I go down on font size because the Verdana's too big, then the courier is almost unreadable.

According to these conclusions, it seems we should be using Verdana, but at 10 point.

Oh, god, that is *so* a year ago.

...

Actually, seriously, I agree that it's easier to read sans-serif fonts (just not, like, Helvetica or Arial or any of *those* boxy ones) on the computer. I can read serif fonts, but then I need more white space around them so they sort themselves out in my head. Verdana 14 isn't the most perfect solution in the world, but I can't think of one that would work better.

Verdana is one of the only fonts that doesn't look wacky to me in OSX, with anti-aliasing. Courier is impossible to read.

It's true-- on my mother's computer, with 10.2, the fonts are anti-aliased out to *here*. They're more anti-aliasing than solid font. It's very hard to read.

OK this one: Readability of Fonts in the Windows Environment I'm kind of "eh..." about because they studied specific fonts, and quite ugly ones at that, and they seem to have studied them at weird sizes too. I don't quite get it and I'm not sure it's got wide applicability, at a first glance.

The other one, I don't know, it all seems scientific, except for his first table where he just chucks in numbers and we have to guess they mean "people who preferred this font".

I now hereby revise my position to "serifs are more readable in print" -- though nobody did the same comparison with print serif and sans-serif fonts, did they? -- and I prefer serif fonts for body text. But I'm old-fashioned.

Things have slowed down to a crawl for me. In fact, I spent about 15 minutes getting 404s, and not a good Buffista 404.

Is this traffic-related on the site, or am I just suffering because the internet is out to get me?

I haven't noticed any such problems, myself.

Shrift just said the over in natter:

Hmm. It seems the Internet could be hinky through Christmas Eve due to AT&T's backbone routers experiencing hinky delays, and that's just altogether too hinky for me.

I had a bit of slowness, and pages timing out, but only for a couple of minutes.

I've been having issues with speed and some inability to connect with the server for the Phoenix (maybe timing out?), but not other sites where I read also. Hmmm... Like Jesse I was chalking it up to increased traffic here which totally made sense in an "Oh No" sort of way.

It's true-- on my mother's computer, with 10.2, the fonts are anti-aliased out to *here*. They're more anti-aliasing than solid font. It's very hard to read.

There's a system preference to change the amount of anti-aliasing done. It's worth a try to play with that setting to see if there's one that looks better to you.

Also-- RL-- if you are using IE, I found that turning off IE's anti-aliasing helps A LOT!