In February 2017, I made several changes to this, my main website. For the most part, this page is about changes in appearance, and consists of mild nerding out about choosing and customizing the Twenty Sixteen theme. Before I get to that, I’ll note changes to a couple of other things.
- Hosting. I moved Changing Way from WordPress.com to SiteGround. I may post about this decision, but now I’ll just say that I wasn’t unhappy with WordPress.com, but I am happy to be at SiteGround. I also moved transferred management of the changingway.org domain to SiteGround (it was previously managed by GoDaddy, and I wasn’t unhappy with GoDaddy either).
- Plugins. Soon after I moved the site, I installed: WP-SpamShield to protect against comment spam; and TablePress, because some content just belongs in table form (e.g., Work Experience). So far, so good.
The appearance of a WordPress site depends on: the choice of theme; and the customization of the chosen theme. I wanted a theme that was:
- Clean, perhaps a little old-school bloggish.
- Likely to be supported for the forseeable future.
- Customizable, so that I could without too much trouble make Changing Way look different from other sites with the same theme.
- Free, a word which here means free: as in no charge; like free beer. Free like free speech is even more important, but WordPress is free software in that sense, so I won’t dwell on the issue here.
The Twenty Sixteen theme meets all these criteria. However, I hesitated to use it, because as a (former) WordPress default theme it is used by a vast number of sites. I didn’t want this site to look too much like too many other sites.
That brings us to customization. Here are some of the reasons this looks like my site, rather than just yet another WordPress site using Twenty Sixteen.
- The header image, which is a crop of a photo I took years ago,
- The use of orange, which few people like as much as I do.
- Online advice on how to customize Twenty Sixteen, especially this post by Om.
- You know, if you have read this far, you are probably best served by a look at the Additional CSS.. Here is is, as Feb 28. 2017.
/*
Additional CSS:
for theme Twenty Sixteen;
at changingway.org.
*/
/*
Make header more compact.
*/
#masthead {
padding-top: 0px !important;
padding-bottom: 6px !important;
}
.header-image {
margin-top: 0.2em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
/*
Titles: site > entry.
*/
.site-title {
font-size: 48px;
font-size: 3rem;
}
.entry-title {
font-size: 32px;
font-size: 2rem;
}
/*
I like orange.
*/
.site-title a {
color: orange !important;
}
.entry-title a {
color: orange;
}
.widget li a, .widget a {
color: orange !important;
}
.main-navigation a {
color: orange !important;
}
.widget {
border-top: 2px solid #1a1a1a;
margin-bottom: 1.75em;
padding-top: 1.75em;
}
/*
No underlines.
*/
a {text-decoration: none !important;}
.entry-content a, .entry-summary a, .taxonomy-description a, .logged-in-as a, .comment-content a, .pingback .comment-body > a, .textwidget a, .entry-footer a:hover, .site-info a:hover {
box-shadow: none;
}
/*
No need for site footer:
credits go in separate page.
*/
.site-info {
visibility: hidden !important;
}