I’ve updated site design. There are still some things I’d liked to tweak, but it’s been in the works for about six weeks and is finally good-enough to roll out. Here are the new features:
- Better responsive design The top menu collapses into a drop-down button in narrow browser windows and on mobile devices. Unlike the fiddling I had to do with the old template, this just worked.
- Search The main reason I switched. Pretty neat that it’s possible on an S3-hosted static site.
- Tags The sidebar/bottom has a tag list for each article, and there’s tag page in the header. This new feature forced me to go back and retro-actively tag all my posts. Good thing I don’t write more.
- All posts page About is now at the top of the home page with recent articles below. It makes more sense to introduce myself above the fold than place new posts there; this isn’t a destination site like Daring Fireball.
- Former and previous links below each post Looking for templates that supported the last feature is what started all this.
I branched the repo in early February based on the Elegant theme by Talha Mansoor.
It was medium effort to get the search plugin and footnotes working. By far the hardest part was fiddling with the CSS. The responsive stuff is all handled by Bootstrap, and the search plugin had its own CSS as well. Figuring out how to modify and/or over-ride their defaults required research on CSS syntax and rules. The first 90 percent took about 10 seconds. The last 10 percent took 6 weeks.1
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Well five weeks and 6 days to find the motivation to work on it again, then a couple of hours to actually get it right. ↩