Fonts, sleep, and low-hanging fruits

Yeah, I like doing sentence case for blog postings, I think. :) Now that most people care, but it is still a conscious decision. Kind of like trying to get more sleep. Since I was so sick last week and burned out last weekend on Lethe's Yarn, I decided to aim for a proper 21:00 bed time. Three nights ago, I was up until 03:00 because my brain wouldn't sleep. Two nights ago, I actually passed out at 21:00 as planned and had a wonderful day (and the Wii Fit game said I lost a pound, go figure). Last night? Stayed up an extra hour putzing on the computer, then couldn't sleep until 02:00.

So much for going to bed early. But, its better than nothing.

One of the things that kept me up was web fonts. This obscure little thing is related to the days when Geocities had horrible sites and the fonts people would pick would make you want to scrape your eyes out. But, in my hat of being a web designer, there are times when I would like to use something other than the six standard fonts. Yeah, headers and footers would be nice, but I'd also like to be able to set the default font for the page to the font I hope to use in my books. Or to match said font when someone else publishes me.

Of course, one of the groups who hate the idea of embedding fonts are those who make said fonts. And then the terrible quote:

The fonts you’re allowed to embed legally aren't worth using; the fonts that are worth using aren't embeddable.

There are some amazing people who are willing to give away their fonts for free. When I finish mine (which I did for Running Bomb), I'll start posting them myself on my imitation font foundry. But, there are people like Ray Larabie who makes amazing fonts and lets you use them for free (and charges for the extra features). Or SIL International who create one of my favorite fonts at the moment, Gentium. I mean, can't you imagine this for heading fonts for a fantasy site?

Sadly, the technologies for changing fonts are wide and varied. There is the CSS way of doing it, but Firefox doesn't support it. Webkit does, which includes Google's new Chrome and Safari (some day), but the features of Chrome aren't there yet for me; great idea, just needs a bit of maturity and the plugins I use. The other is the just as amazing sIFR which uses text-replacement to swap out headers for Flash pages. I did that with a bit of PHP a few years back for my Sepia Thrones site (Exalted game site), but sIFR does it better, faster, and smoother. And doesn't require you to keep a temporary directory of random text renderings.

I'm considering these since I'm working on the web design for my new personal site, http://d.moonfire.us/. There is absolutely nothing there, but I'm hoping to have a new site up in the next week or so. I'm mixing it in with the other little projects I've been working on. Right now, it seems like low-hanging fruit projects right now, little things I can knock off in an hour and I've been ignoring for a month or came up since the flood. Managed to do five of them last night and I have to say, it feels good to just knock something off my todo list.