1 Don't look now!

(Not his fault.  I just fixed a bug in the stylesheet, and the setting he was using to get a grey sidebar is now doing what it should do, and turning the entire page grey...)

2 Well, there appears to be something wrong with his header, now--the anigif on the top seems weird, and there's some antialiasing issues that probably need fixing.

3 I'm going to replace that animated gif.  (If it's the ducky one, it looks weird on his site; if it's the other one, it's off by a couple of pixels in different frames.)

Not sure what you mean about the antialiasing issues.  There's some minor artifacting and what looks like artifacting but isn't (the bottom menu bar looks a bit odd because there are some ripples in the water in the original image).

The banner is generated by the software - you feed it an image and push some buttons.  So if there's something not right, I'll fix it!

4

Meh, it looks ok now.  What I saw before was some text that had been antialiased for a light background, and was now on a dark one, so it had sort of a halo around it.  Seems to be gone now.

5

Back when The Pond first moved to mu.nu, I was having health problems, but didn't really realize it.  One of the problems was with my eyes; black on white wasn't as readable as light on dark (I used to "select all" on every website I read, just to get that effect).

Since I never expected to have anybody other than Official First Reader Mallory visiting my site, I set it up so I could read it... then after I started to have a couple of visitors, I realized that the light-on-dark scheme was different from every other blog out there.  At least that'd stick in people's minds, right?

Now that I've moved to Minx, I realize that I don't need the added contrast, and the banner doesn't look good on a dark background... that's a very nice duck.

6

I have heavy astigmatism, and it isn't possible to fully correct it with glasses. Light characters on a black background are surrounded with whispy frills. Black characters on a white background don't have that problem. (And that's why stars look particularly starry to me. It's not just that they twinkle; they're affected by my astigmatism.)

7

What I saw before was some text that had been antialiased for a light background, and was now on a dark one, so it had sort of a halo around it.  Seems to be gone now.

Okay.  It's possible Wonderduck was fiddling with the settings in the banner generator.  The default options are set to do decent antialiasing, but you can get odd-looking results if you play around.

8 Not intentionally, though in trying to get the banner to do what I wanted (and I never did accomplish... it took a Pixy Intervention), I may have done something accidentally.