Note: take the following with all the grains of salt you take when reading any pedantry...just soapboxy but not meant to be too tone-policing.
I personally prefer headings for the purpose of signaling the main topics of an essay...the main headline, of course, but then the "deck" (usually what would go into the webpage's meta description), and then subsections. The headings do double-duty -- emphasizing key points and visually separating sections -- without adding too much gratuitous weight.
Keep in mind that you can use physical priority to signal emphasis. The first few words of any paragraph are likely to be noticed by a skimmer, so adding extra weight to the type can be redundant. IMHO, this also applies to the closing words of a paragraph.
Also, in-paragraph hyperlinks also serve as a kind of emphasis (while providing useful outbound references). In your current style sheet, hyperlinks are underlined. Again, everyone sees things differently, but I personally notice hyperlinked text and mentally treat it as "kind of important", particularly for proper nouns and keywords (e.g. "New Relic" and "Nagios")
Here's a sample graf of yours with how you emphasized it:
> I’d say that the most difficult ones were the first few weeks. After that period I’ve known pretty much everything in terms of the project structure that I will be following. Once I’ve established my design patterns it literally became a no-brainer to create new __Watchers__ or __Integrations__. I’ve also made it quite easy to create your own extensions which is described __here__ and plug into the overall pipeline seamlessly. The key was to design the very simple interfaces and let the other part of the framework do the heavy lifting.
I don't think anything in that graf needs to be emphasized (the hyperlinks are fine). The first sentence speaks for itself. The last sentence, if you feel it's important enough, could be its own standalone graf.
Again, treat these as the curmudgeony suggestions of someone who still subscribes to a print newspaper. But I felt your otherwise great essay was unfairly maligned by commenters...but I could sympathize with them. Your words speak well enough on their own, no need to add the CSS equivalent of exclamation marks so frequently :)
I personally prefer headings for the purpose of signaling the main topics of an essay...the main headline, of course, but then the "deck" (usually what would go into the webpage's meta description), and then subsections. The headings do double-duty -- emphasizing key points and visually separating sections -- without adding too much gratuitous weight.
Keep in mind that you can use physical priority to signal emphasis. The first few words of any paragraph are likely to be noticed by a skimmer, so adding extra weight to the type can be redundant. IMHO, this also applies to the closing words of a paragraph.
Also, in-paragraph hyperlinks also serve as a kind of emphasis (while providing useful outbound references). In your current style sheet, hyperlinks are underlined. Again, everyone sees things differently, but I personally notice hyperlinked text and mentally treat it as "kind of important", particularly for proper nouns and keywords (e.g. "New Relic" and "Nagios")
Here's a sample graf of yours with how you emphasized it:
> I’d say that the most difficult ones were the first few weeks. After that period I’ve known pretty much everything in terms of the project structure that I will be following. Once I’ve established my design patterns it literally became a no-brainer to create new __Watchers__ or __Integrations__. I’ve also made it quite easy to create your own extensions which is described __here__ and plug into the overall pipeline seamlessly. The key was to design the very simple interfaces and let the other part of the framework do the heavy lifting.
I don't think anything in that graf needs to be emphasized (the hyperlinks are fine). The first sentence speaks for itself. The last sentence, if you feel it's important enough, could be its own standalone graf.
Again, treat these as the curmudgeony suggestions of someone who still subscribes to a print newspaper. But I felt your otherwise great essay was unfairly maligned by commenters...but I could sympathize with them. Your words speak well enough on their own, no need to add the CSS equivalent of exclamation marks so frequently :)