As you may know, Boles Blogs is now a combination of 14 other blogs that used to make up the Boles Blogs Network.  Everything is simpler, and more “findable” now that we’re all under the same mindset, and that’s a good and grand thing.  We’re also now on the WordPress.com “Business” platform, and that bundling of valuable resources all in one place is one of the fine benefits of being hosted on WordPress.

One of the chits of the Business platform is having free and unfettered access to any and all “Premium” WordPress.com themes.  We are currently using the keen and very clean premium “Elemin” theme you can see in the screenshot below.  I’m viewing the page in the Chrome browser for Mac:

Elemin has a delicate elegance and simplicity of design that I appreciate.  When I first investigated using the Elemin theme a week or so ago, it was for sale on WordPress.com for $100.00 USD.  Doing a WordPress.com support forum search indicated the price used to be $65.00USD.  I see the current price of the Elemin theme is now $115.00!  A $15.00USD price increase in under a week!  It makes good money sense to be on the Business side of WordPress.com.  Sure, I’m renting yearly access to all the Premium themes, but I’m fine with that.  Renting 100% of everything is a better deal to me than owning 1% of nothing.

You can customize the Elemin theme to look and feel as you wish.  I love the interactive WordPress.com “Appearance” editor that makes choosing, and employing, fonts and page design so much simpler now than it was in the  bad old standalone TypeKit and Rotating Header Image tutorials.

One thing I discovered over the weekend, to my aesthetic design horror, was how awful this Boles Blogs looks under Firefox for Mac!  All the font styling is gone!  What happened?  Am I missing something that I need to add in the Custom CSS fields?  I don’t use Firefox much anymore, and I have no extensions installed.  You can get any plainer for a browser install than what I have running for Firefox — yet it renders this beautiful blog, and our Elemin theme customizations, so danged ugly — as you can see below:

Here’s how Safari for Mac renders Boles Blogs:  Perfectly — just like Google Chrome!  If you have any idea why Elemin and/or Firefox are rendering this blog wrong — please leave me a comment or two and let me know how to fix this!

When you look at this blog in a computer browser — what form do you see?  The correct Chrome/Safari look?  Or the wrong Firefox perception?  Or something else?

As an aside, if you look at the bottom of this WordPress.com blog, you can see a link to the design “Customization” of this blog.  All our font and formatting and theme secrets are revealed — not by choice — but by WordPress.com hosting mandate!

Here’s what what the customization page currently looks like for this blog under Elemin:

I both like and hate the idea of revealing the details of our blog design. It’s good in that people, if so inspired, can similarly set up their blog as we’ve defined ours; it’s bad in the depths because the first rule of magic, is to never reveal the secret of your illusion. We have been demystified!

17 Comments

    1. The new font is smaller in the backend rich text view — I can’t control that — but I made the default public browser reading font larger than the default. Do you think the reading text size in the browser needs to be larger? Or are you talking about the header font size?

        1. Hmm. Interesting! Are you on Mac or Windows? What browser? Is this both at home and work?

          I’m curious what others think about the reading font. Larger? Smaller? Same?

          1. I seem to primarily have the issue at my work PC — Windows, running a portable version of Chrome. It looks fine at home on my Macbook running Chrome.

          2. I’m all for bigger fonts — I may do a fonts test. It all just looks so huge to my eye right now.

            I posted a link to this article in the “Premium Theme” support forum for WordPress.com — so maybe they’ll have a Firefox fix that might influence any changes I might make.

    1. Ah! I thought you were talking about Blockquotes formatting in the body of the article, not in the comments. That does look wrong. I will ask WP.com staff to look at it.

  3. Here’s where I’m reporting the Elemin problems:

    http://premium-themes.forums.wordpress.com/topic/customized-elemin-font-rendering-trouble-in-firefox-for-mac?replies=3

    Let me know if you can read that or not — it’s the private “premium theme” support area that you can only access if you buy a premium theme or on the Business plan — but if you have backend access to support chat, I’d think you’d be able to get in there as well?

      1. Well, that’s interesting! I thought that was a private forum for only those who paid money for premium themes. It’s good the forum is transparent, though. Everyone can benefit that way.

  4. I’m on the dreadful Firefox. Fonts and things look like you want them. Not like the example in your story. I think that’s good. Looks good.

    1. I saw a message in the WP forum explaining that the premium forum was an open forum. That’s good news. I don’t think it used to be that way. I think you had to buy a premium theme to get access to the support help in that forum.

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