It's been a while since I've updated the theme of the blog, so I spent some time re-doing my blog. My main goal was to create something built for responsive. I was able to bootstrap my idea, with the Start Bootstrap - Clean Blog theme. This leverages Bootstrap for the base CSS and adds some specialized styling. I made a few tweaks to the template source, to adjust it based on the way I wanted.
Here's a few of the tweaks I made:
- Tweaked the navigation bar to be sticky when scrolling (it used to only re-appear when scrolling up).
- Added styling for comments.
- Enlarged the checkbox element
There's still a few things I want to tweak:
- Limit index page blog content. I got away from splitting my content up with leading copy. I want to add some intelligent parsing to limit how much of each blog entry shows. If I haven't explicitly split content, I want to limit the content to 1 or 2 block elements (either 1 large block, or 2 smaller blocks). I'll probably do this by parsing the content, then doing a word count on the first couple of paragraphs.
- Use AJAX for all form submission. I just didn't have time to get to it over the weekend.
- I may decide to bring the search feature back—but I suspect I was the only who used it.
I did end up dropping a number of features, because I just didn't feel they were ultimately needed. I wanted something cleaner that concentrated just on content and most really didn't offer any value to readers. Here are some things I dropped:
- The sidebar category navigation.
- The "Calendar" pod.
- The "Recent Comments" pod.
- My old "Photo album"—this hadn't been updated in a long time and there are better places for friends to find my photos!
- Subscribing to my blog.
- Searching my blog.
If you want to see what it looked like before the change, check out the old version on the Wayback Machine archive.
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