Angry in the Great White North

Here are the results of the 2007 Blog Awards in the Best Canadian Blog category:

1. Small Dead Animals (46.9%)
2. Raymitheminx (30.7%)
3. Five Feet of Fury (6.7%)
4. Angry in the Great White North (5.8%)
5. Mitchieville (3.9%)
6. Apply-Liberally (2.9%)
7. Scott's DiaTribes (1.3%)
8. The Canadian Sentinel (1.0%)
9. What's Next (0.5%)
10. Verbalized (0.3%)

In celebration of my lock on fourth, I've rolled out a new version of my banner. Actually, I'm teaching myself how to use Adobe Illustrator, but heck, the timing was just right.

Congratulations to everyone who was selected out of the scores of nominations to stand as examples of the best Canadian blogging has to offer. And thanks to everyone who thought I was the best of the best. I appreciated each and every vote.

And on a partisan note, I can't help but notice that the four of the top five spots were handily won by representatives of Canada's conservative blogging community.

Updates on Styling:

During my lunch break, people might have noticed the blog fluctuating, and then settling down into the previous configuration. There was change, but it won't be visible except on mobiles like a BlackBerry. My configuration before had the title banner and the search box zone are share a div that spanned the width of the blog. Below that was the content and the sidebar divs, side by side. The change was to merge the banner and the content into a single div that went the length of the blog, then have the search box zone and the two sidebar columns arranged within their own div that also went down the length of the blog.

So I moved from a horizontal ordering to a vertical one, but without any apparent change to most users. Why bother? On a BlackBerry and other devices that view the site without processing the Cascading Style Sheets, the previous configuration meant that you'd see the banner, then the big RSS and social media buttons, then the PayPal form, then the search box, then the content. Now on a device that ignores CSS, you see the banner, then the content, and then after all the content, the buttons, PayPal, search box, blogrolls and so on.

It's important for BlackBerry users because when you're browsing on a device like that, you just want to get to content as quickly as possible. You only have a little space to work with and that thumb roller as your only means of manipulation, so anything that puts content in front as quickly as possible and reduces the amount of thumb scrolling is a good thing.

BlackBerry users might need to force a refresh when they visit the site to see the change take effect.

Besides improving the experience for BlackBerry users, the change is also relevant to search engine spiders. Spiders also ignore CSS directives. Now Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the rest will first see the banner and then content and links to deeper content, and everything else much farther down, only after all the content is encountered.

Update on the Banner:

Again the use of the colour white on the word "white" is causing some heartburn, since it suggests some sort of racist connotation. Don't worry about offending me -- I noticed it too, and I've never been certain just how prevalent that view is. But it is coming up again, and so I think I'll need to address it.

There are some things I can do:

• Colour "white" the same as the "great" and "north"
• Colour "white" something different (a different shade, perhaps) but not white and not the same as "great" and "north"
• Invert the colours ("great" and "north" are white, and "white" is yellowish)
• Put spaces between the words and stop using colours to separate them
• Change the font (the size, the style, or the offset from the baseline) in order to separate out the words
• Use textures instead of colours to separate out the words
• Get someone with a graphic design diploma or degree to do this, since clearly I'm not competent
• Change the name of the blog to "Steve's Blog"

Any suggestions?