Readers, you no doubt have noticed that Letters Blogatory looks different today. I like the way it looked before, but the “theme” I was using is several years old, and for various reasons that won’t be visible to you, it made sense for me to switch to a more modern theme. I’m still fiddling with how the site should look, and because of my, ahem, very small staff of web designers and programmers, I have to do the fiddling on the website itself instead of on a test site that larger operations might use for this purpose. So you will likely see things changing for the next while, and maybe things breaking. Please bear with me, and if you notice anything broken, please let me know. And if you have any expertise in web design and would like to help Letters Blogatory look its best, please be in touch!

One other point to mention, which will be of interest only to folks interested in online privacy and security: in general,¹ until now, when you visit Letters Blogatory, your browser has only downloaded files from two places: the Letters Blogatory server itself, and a “content delivery network” or CDN, a group of servers all around the world that let you download almost all of the files you need to read Letters Blogatory, except for the text of the posts themselves, at very fast speeds. The new theme has somewhat improved typography, and this means that you now will be downloading some font files from Google. This may not be a permanent thing. But while it lasts, it has some minor privacy implications, since Google now has the technical means to see that you are reading Letters Blogatory. You can read about the privacy issues here. But in the end, this seems to me to be a very minor issue. Both the CDN I mentioned and my DNS servers are run by Amazon, which means that a third party already had the ability to see that you were connecting to Letters Blogatory. And neither Amazon nor Google has the ability to read the content of your communications, so they can’t tell what post you are reading, and they can’t read anything you submit via the contact page, the subscription form, or a comment form.

Thanks as always for reading, and I welcome any feedback on the new look.

1. There have been minor exceptions, e.g., posts where I have embedded a tweet.