I've been changing my Ode body type settings over the past few days. I've switched fonts, sizes and line height.

I did take some inspiration from Rob Reed's Ode blog, especially on the line-height property in the css.

While I liked the Carme font I pulled from Google, it looked better on some devices (newer iPod Touch, systems running Linux) than others (older iPad, systems running Windows), and I wasn't crazy about the noticeable delay in text showing up on the screen while the client device pulled the font from Google.

So I went with Helvetica Neue, though I also like Arial and Verdana. Even plain sans-serif looks good. I might keep switching things up.

I still haven't yanked the Droid Sans Mono font I pulled from Google for code blocks. Since the rest of the type shows up on the page without delay, I don't think a late-blooming code font is much of a distraction. And I really like Droid Sans Mono.

The body type font size has been changing day to day. I went from 14px to 12px and now 13px.

I bumped the post headline font up six pixels to 22px. I could go bigger. I could go bold. Not just yet.

I spent much of yesterday fighting with WordPress to make it do what I want. Not having unfettered (or any) FTP access to the server didn't help.

Today I had a problem (caused by a previous experimental change) with my Ode site's RSS and fixed it in about two minutes. Before I started, I forked the theme by copying and re-dating its directory so I had a full backup. Then I removed the problematic line of code, and everything was as it should be.

Understanding how it works makes it easier to fix, modify, experiment and not lose your data in the process.

I'm not saying WordPress isn't a great system, but the simplicity of Ode is one of its strongest assets. Anything you know about HTML, CSS and Linux/Unix will help you. And Ode can help you learn about those things. Then you can apply that newfound knowledge directly to the rest of your work.

I was looking over old threads in the Ode forum and this one introduced me to Carme from Google Web Fonts.

I went to Google Web Fonts, searched for Carme and followed the instructions, calling an additional stylesheet (from Google) into my Ode theme and then calling the Carme in the Logic theme's own CSS.

I like it. It looks better on my Linux (Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3) desktop than it does on Windows 8 right now, so I'm not sure I'll stick with it. But for now I will.