Logic Matters seems to be settling comfortably into its new home with a different hosting company, though a fair bit remains to be done.
- For a start, pages now load much faster (mostly, within a second or two). The laggardly behaviour on Bluehost was an annoyance, a major reason for moving in the first place, so it is good that Siteground is indeed considerably snappier.
- The new Astra theme is, as they say, “responsive” (meaning that it knows whether you are on a computer, tablet or mobile, and makes visual adjustments accordingly).
- To help keep pages loading fast, I have kept things simple (with e.g. a minimal number of plugins.). And I’m really pretty happy with the understated look’n’feel of Logic Matters on a tablet or mobile. After all, this is basically a wordy text-based site, so visual drama seems inappropriate. On a desktop, if you open a big window then you do get a really boring expanse of grey around the content areas. But replacing that with even a very low-key abstract background gives a surprisingly distracting effect; so I’m inclined to keep things as plain as they are. So I hope people like the simple layout (though I’m certainly open to suggestions for fine-tuning the design).
- The content of the footer area on tablet/computer pages is a bit unimaginative: but I’m not sure what would be more interesting/useful (again I’m open to suggestions).
- The blog is now 15 years old (I missed its birthday), but I’m for the moment keeping all the legacy posts online, if only because they are the nearest I have to a diary of recent years. A link-checker tells me that a lot of old links within the blog no longer work but I’m not going to worry about that. I might set up a page, however, linking to past blog highlights (i.e. linking to posts which are mini-essays of one kind or another that might have more than ephemeral interest).
- One bit of functionality I still need to restore is being able to sign up to notifications of posts. It’s on my to-do list.
- Meanwhile, I’m rather slowly and sporadically checking/reworking the other, static, pages. In particular, the much-visited LaTeX pages are more than overdue for a bit of attention: but don’t hold your breath — updating these and some other pages always seems to take an inordinate amount of time (if only because web-searches for relevant materials take me off down distracting byways).
I’m glad I made the hosting change and updated to a modern WordPress theme. It’s been a bit of a palaver, because of course you always underestimate the amount of fiddly work involved in this sort of thing. But it’s been worth it, and we’re getting there …
I’ve noticed a couple of problems that can occur when commenting.
1. If I slide the mouse cursor over some text to select that text, that doesn’t highlight the text. Instead, it covers the text with a dark blue that obscures it.
2. If I edit my comment, the ‘Save’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons are large blue boxes.
Many thanks for this. I’d misunderstood, and hence mis-set, a theme-option which governs inter alia the look of text-selection. I’ve corrected that.
The large boxes for ‘Save” and ‘Cancel’ were an interaction between (1) the “Simple Comment Editing” plug-in which allows you to edit for a while (ten minutes now), and (2) the main Astra theme. I’ve changed a couple of settings, and they play together more nicely now.