At the moment it feels as if I’m giving my site a new theme every year.
What happened was I was downloading various free themes to my development / staging site to get some ideas for themes for other things and other people, when I thought I quite liked the look of one of them.
It’s called Affinity, by Automattic, and is a one-page theme with blog for weddings and other big announcements. As if…
Anyway, I took it, hacked about with it (instead of creating a child theme, like what I should have), and renamed it Infinity. Took me longer than usual, as this theme was built mobile-first; so instead of starting big and cutting out bits to fit the smaller space it started small and expanded to fill the extra space. Hence my first few edits were the wrong way round, until I sussed what was going on. And then I adopted the block editor (it’s still crap with tables), so no going back now.
But overall, the look of the site is now a bit calmer. Gone are the drop-down menus and the riot of colour. Do you like?
One issue I’ve always had an… issue with is featured images or thumbnails. Most of my scribblings don’t need one, and Affinity puts one on every page. If you don’t have a featured image it randomly selects one from a list of five.
Five seemed a bit restricting, so I trawled through the (mostly) 35mm negatives I’d scanned in during 2017, and through my digital efforts, and now have 33 images from 40 years of photography to randomly select from. And the list is increasing as I discover potentially suitable photos on my iPhone. Not all of them work; the Egypt one might go, the British Library one I might retake on a brighter, sunnier day and there’s more than necessary from Brussels. And what’s with all the boats?
Some don’t easily fit the space available (2000 x 900 pixels seems to be the compromise size for PC and mobile). And, this being WordPress, I can’t automatically use the same images as featured images for specific posts or even categories & tags – until I come up with a fix.
The main thing is that all the photos are mine. Who knew I was so talented?
The kicker is that I’d planned to go live today with the new theme to mark my new job. But that went out of the window as I didn’t even get an interview. Oops. I did it again.