White text on black background

Yes, my personal altar has a few dents in it.

One of the comments that I often recieve about this blog is that the white text on the black background makes it hard to read. I never recieve this comment on any of my other blogs...because this is the only blog I maintain that I use black background with white text.

When I set up this blog, I decided to go for the Golden Dawn symbolism. Anyone who has gone though a GD Neophyte (0=0) initiation ritual should be aware of the importance of the symbolism of the colors: red, white and black. They may or may not be aware of the yellow and blue...depends upon which officers could attend the ritual.

"Light dawning in darkness" is the keyphrase for a lot of what is happening in Golden Dawn ritual.

And I am not the only Golden Dawn blogger who has choosen to use a black background with white text, plus the occasional splash of yellow, green and red.

Given what I have learned over the last six years, would I start a new GD blog using this color scheme? Symbolically, it is still good.

But as a blogger, I probably wouldn't. My readers are right; it is hard to read. Plus there is research to back that up--no professional blogger uses white text on black background (I remember seeing a study on reader's reactions to various text and background colors, but I can't remember where I saw it). Furthermore, occasionally this color scheme combined with a glitch in the Blogger post editor causes me to post a post with black text...on black background (sometimes I catch it; sometimes my readers see it first). The only way to cope with a "glitch day" is to write the post, then highlight the whole post and change the whole post manually to white text, and hope that you never need to edit the post (because it is white text on white background in the post editor).

I will admit that I have considered changing the color scheme on this blog. But the lack of time, and it is a real low priority to do (because hacking out more erotica short stories creates more income), has put the task to the back burner. After all, I will have to go though my entire post history, post by post, to find all the places that the new color scheme makes something unreadable (such as the occasional yellow text which I find impossible to read on white backgrounds). And that is a thousand posts or so to eyeball.

My advice to anyone starting up a new blog--do not use white text on black background; it is just not worth the grief.