Raising the Bar for Web Fonts

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It started out as an experiment. Being a front-end developer, I wanted my blog have a unique feel. I changed the typography, but the Twenty Ten theme already uses the two best Web-safe fonts: Helvetica and Georgia. Any change I made felt like a step backwards.

A few sites have started using font embedding via the @font-face property, but I hadn’t tried it yet. Typekit was my first stop. I set up a free account and perused their library.

There are a few decent options in Typekit, but the best fonts are reserved for paid users. I really like Museo and Museo Sans, but in my case I don’t think they’d work. Plus, I really dislike the fact that Typekit makes free users include a floating badge. It’s too obtrusive.

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Optimizing Google AdSense

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When I implemented Google AdSense I noticed my pages loading slower. This was to be somewhat expected, but pages were stopping while each ad loaded. The sidebar was especially slow to appear.

I decided that the best solution would be to load the ads in the footer, but I was a little nervous about how best to achieve this. Luckily, I found a great tutorial on building an AdSense loader. I had to make a few tweaks to the jQuery, but it was a great starting point.

I explained in an earlier post how to display multiple AdSense ads in the loop using WP_Query properties. This builds on that functionality.

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