[jmoiron]

I've independently come up with the same decisions on many of these points and, weirdly, a very similar blog design:

http://jmoiron.net

I decided even to dispatch with the header bar, putting navigation at the bottom of the main page; presumably, people will only care to see more of my writing if they've read the article. Not as good for people revisiting the page, but they can likely remember http://jmoiron.net/blog or bookmark it in order to get to the search.

My fonts are slightly smaller and slightly less contrast, and after looking at Gemmell's blog I wonder if I should change that decision. I wanted to have emphasized elements of the text easily distinguishable from the body while not distracting.

Also, I agree with Gemmell's "The basic tenets of hypertext should be left alone". One of these basic tenets, to me, are the semantic meanings of Blue, Purple, and Red text for normal, :visited, and :active hyperlinks. If you want to chose a link color, do not invert or violate these classical meanings.

[jere]

>I've independently come up with the same decisions on many of these points and, weirdly, a very similar blog design

Yea. I feel the same way, though strangely a lot of this is recent and I didn't have the same opinion a few years ago. A portfolio site I made just 3 years ago looks quite immature now. I just put this together with a little static generator a few weeks ago and it's the first time I've posted it anywhere:

http://www.jere.in/

I do disagree with the post on links. I don't see why underline is necessary and personally I don't like the look. Also, I don't find :visited that useful when reading articles; having it on something like Google is another matter.

I did think about an option to toggle off the highlighting of links completely to reduce distraction.

[qznc]

Nevertheless, you seem to disagree with Gemmell about underlining links. In my opinion the underlining is more important than the color.

[jmoiron]

Yeah, I think that bold looks better with sans serif typefaces than underline, so that was a design rather than an ergonomic decision; perhaps not a correct one. I think underlined blue text is probably the "most linky" looking text, given the history of the web.

[qu4z-2]

Personally, as long as they stand out from the text and are in color, I don't much mind. Maybe I've gotten used to non-underlined links because many designs seem to use them.

For what it's worth, on my design I've made the compromise of underlining them on hover.