The Vertical Blog Syndrome

'Trying to fit a square peg in a round hole' is an old cliche that might be disappearing from the American vernacular. In a way, that would be a shame because it expresses a useful and important idea. We need some new expression to replace it. How about 'trying to write a vertical blog on a horizontal screen.' 

Well OK, the new phrase doesn't have much of a jingle to it. It needs polishing. But it's a truism nonetheless. This morning I was led to a blog from their comment on some other blog. They were an interesting young couple, and I liked their writing. But rather than focus on their content I was distracted by the vertical blog layout, which wasted 30% of the screen. 

Why do so many bloggers opt for this inferior design? In fact if you look at the templates available on "blogger" (blogspot), most of the choices are vertical.

The reader probably wants to know by now why I don't find something more important to complain about. Indeed it does seem foolish to be distracted by the vertical design. Perhaps I let it irk me because it is inexcusably atavistic; it shows an obeisance to the dead-tree publishing industry, which is a favorite pinata on my own horizontally-correct blog.

Say, why don't vertical bloggers tell their digital camera to produce only vertical (portrait mode) photographs?