I'm a much bigger fan of relative width than fixed. But even if this is relative, is it set to just 40% or what? It has the nice effect of invoking old newspaper clipping style, but at the cost of economics. I think bumping it up to at least 65% (personally prefer 80%) would make it seem more space-efficient.

Also, I've always had a bit of a squinting problem looking at text here. It's fine on a 1024 resolution, but 1680 or even 1920 is straining. Freeing up the text size to be relative/browser-determined would help that.

But I like the retention of the color scheme and the elegant new background.