Blog updated…

Posted by Dan on Mar 31, 2015 @ 7:02 AM

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. Smile

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.

Categories: Personal

2 Comments

  • Looks good Dan. I don't think I've every seen the base tag in the wild. I don't think you need meta content="IE=edge" any longer. How did you decide on what font to use?
  • @Phillip:

    The X-UA-Compatible meta tag was part of the theme. While you're correct that it's probably not doing anything, I really didn't want to do any IE8/9 testing, so I just left it in figuring the theme developers had a reason for it. Not a good reason, but you asked. :)

    As for the font, it was the font used in theme. I found it aesthetically pleasing, so I didn't change it.

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