Two relatively glaring differences between early Boidem columns and their later counterparts are the font size of the text on the main page and the degree to which I've worked graphics into these pages.

For almost the full first two years of the Boidem the size for the text of the main column page for each month was "default +1". It changed to the default size just before the end of the second year and has remained that way since. Text on internal pages was the default size from the beginning. I have no idea why this was. My first guess was that the WYSIWYG HTML editor I was using (an integral part of an early version of Netscape) used +1 as its default, but if that was the case the internal pages would have been larger as well. It may have been that early browsers rendered default text such that it seemed quite small, so I enlarged it via the HTML, and then newer browsers rendered text a bit larger so there was no longer any reason for enlarging on my part. Frankly, I don't know, though when I view old pages the text is clearly larger than I think it should be.

Although it would be incorrect to view early columns as heavy on graphics, in comparison to the last few years they certainly were. In this particular case I think that the change was a result of the extent to which we became acquainted with the web. Quite a number of the early columns carried cartoons that examined (or poked fun at) our involvement with this new medium. At some point, however, poking fun became tedious, and the cartoons that tried to do this simply weren't funny. The web had grown out of the "what's this weird new thing?" stage, even if many cartoonists hadn't.