A Fresh Coat of Paint

A Fresh Coat of Paint

I thought that it was time for a new look around these parts, so over the weekend, I’ve been updating the look and feel of my blog.

Longtime readers will know that many moons ago, this blog started out in Movable Type. In 2013, I transitioned to the much better supported WordPress, and I went through a couple of iterations of themes with that.

What you see today is a result of my latest changes.

I’m using a paid-for theme called Somerville, since it seems to work for what I was trying to achieve. In particular I’m using a slightly cleaner layout and don’t have endless long articles on the front page.

I assume that most regular readers are reading via RSS anyway, and that should be unchanged. You’ll still get the full text in your reader of choice. For others, you’re perhaps getting here via links to direct pages probably shared via social media – e.g. my RAJAR reports (themselves now reachable from a top-level menu) – and of course these pages will continue to work as they have done before.

I also wanted to have a neat home for all the book reviews I’ve been writing, and now the homepage has a section specifically for them.

There will be more photos on the site, since the theme works best if I find some kind of photo for every post I publish – that shouldn’t be a problem for me, and I hope to mostly use my own photos. The only real disappointment is that I can’t find a way to get a WordPress “Featured Image” hosted by Flickr. I prefer to use Flickr because it doesn’t put an unnecessarily large load on my own host, and saves me a bit of money as a consequence. On the other hand, photos are important to me, and I want them to look nice on big displays as much as small ones.

I’ve been trying to update the feature pages (under Writing) above to look nicer, as well as things like the Contact page.

The Photography page was updated a few weeks back anyway by virtue of being pushed over to a separate portfolio site that I’ve built using a feature available to members of the Adobe Creative Cloud.

I did come across one small issue with the theme regarding full width images, but the authors sent me a swift fix and promised to fix it in future updates.

Needless to say that all of this should be responsive and therefore look OK on mobile.

If you do find anything that doesn’t work – please let me know!

I’m also giving the Elementor WordPress page builder a go – the free version. That lets you do things like build pages with a widget mechanism. At time of writing, that’s mostly been utilised for my Contact page, but I’ll perhaps try it with more feature-style pages in the future.


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2 responses to “A Fresh Coat of Paint”

  1. Ash Elford avatar
    Ash Elford

    Like the new look!

  2. adambowie avatar
    adambowie

    Cheers Ash.

    Commenting not broken then 🙂