A very personal blog

Layout change!

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I’ve wanted to update my layout for sooooo long but I just don’t have the time recently (excuses). It’s impossible for me to get a new theme because this one I have right now has been customized too much, way too much it’s hard to bring all those changes to a new template. Argh.

Here’s a random photo from Unsplash:

So there, after the font change (from Montserrat x Crimson Text to Playfair Display x Lora), I finally found a way to rearrange my posts. At the surface, it’s really just the layout that’s changed. Featured image on the left, post summary on the right. THAT’S IT. But do you know how much effort that took me and my puny brain?

First, I have to float certain elements to the left or to the right, add some margins, adjust some paddings, blah. Easy peasy, they’re all just CSS.

Next, I have to set a default photo for posts that have no pictures in them (aka. my daily dramas). Otherwise the left part of the post excerpt is going to be empty. I thought I could just expand the snippet to 100% if there’s no image but it looks unbalanced and ugly. And since that solution also entails some code-digging, I’d rather work on something that’s tedious but pretty. That is, looking for a way to set a default thumbnail for pure text posts.

And I did. I found a solution over heeere. I had to study where to insert the code correctly, but when it worked, all that’s left is polishing.

Not really.

When the code finally worked — ok let’s not insult developers. When the markup finally worked. I had to test for responsiveness. So that’s another level of adjustments, mostly paddings, margins, media size behaviors. Urgh. And we’re done.

And I’m happy!

There’s a part in me that wants to do some refactoring but I’m afraid I’ll mess something up. There’s literal gibberish in my template. I have 1000+ lines of CSS, and a bunch of encrypted javascript functions I may or may not be using. I have sliders and carousels I want to remove because even though they’re hidden via CSS, they’re still eating up loading time. Argh. I’m a total webdesign wreck. Just kidding.

But yeah, let’s leave it for later.

Happy Friday, friends!

EDIT: My archives are a mess please don’t go there for now. 🙂