Yes, I Changed It Again!

• Tweet
• Pin It

I feel the need to issue an apology of sorts to my regular readers. My biggest human failing, I have little doubt, is a general lack of patience. I’m a lot better at finding patience than I used to be, and oddly enough, I tend to be more patient on the bigger things than I am on the small stuff.

In all of the craziness of the world, one’s blog design, I’m afraid, is small stuff. So my patience was wearing thin.

The last “new” theme I had was a somewhat reasonable substitute to the older theme, “Caulk,” that I liked so much despite the fact that its coding wouldn’t allow certain critical plugins to work properly. But that new theme also had a few issues: first, a margin that wouldn’t allow for the post text to move off the left edge of the page; and second, a slider that put far too much dead space between the image and the post text. The designer, whom I had to contact through a ticket form, sent me a message the other day claiming that he couldn’t replicate the text margin issue — despite the fact that almost everyone who commented about it was easily able to do so depending on which machine he or she used — and also admitted that despite numerous attempts on his own demo version of the theme, he was unable to make the slider stop displaying with the white space but was still working on it.

So when I read that, I realized that it might be time to try finding one other option.

This current theme, “MakNews” is that one other option. If something goes wrong with this one, I may have to downgrade Livefyre back to the previous version and go back to “Caulk.” As much as I like that layout, I don’t really want to downgrade Livefyre, nor do I want to face the inevitable customization required to make that theme work with all plugins the way I need it to. (The designer of that theme no longer does custom editing for it: he has moved on to custom web design. I can’t fault him for that, I suppose; designing websites from the ground up is certainly a lot more lucrative than patching a hole here or there on an existing one that’s already been purchased.)

This new theme, meanwhile, satisfies several key criteria:

1. It gives me a featured slider on the front page.
2. It displays “latest posts” below the slider so no one has to go searching for regular programming.
3. It works with the thumbnail size orientation I have and was not willing to change.
4. It is compatible with Livefyre 3.5.
5. The text margins appear reasonable on all devices (so far).
6. There’s an option for a video widget (I’m not using it, yet!) for future use.

But like every other theme I’ve ever used, there are a few minor things that annoy me:

1. Thumbnails don’t appear on post pages. FIXED! Thanks to the theme’s developer!
2. A well-organized options panel allows me to customize fonts, but it apparently doesn’t give me control of all of them.
3. A few of the fonts the customization panel doesn’t give me control of are fonts I really want changed.
4. I’d like to drop the “Popular” tab from the sidebar posts tab. FIXED! Replaced the widget, still need to work on formatting of those.

Yeah, yeah, I know: these gripes all fall under the popular Twitter tag, “first-world problems.” In the grand scheme of things, they’re minor.

I’ll get the thumbnails to appear somehow, and at some point, I’ll get all of the fonts under control. The thumbnail issue is of much bigger importance to me at the moment, because I do like the way posts display with them. Once I work that out, I’ll worry about correcting more minor text issues.

In the meantime, I’ll at least be satisfied that the theme looks a little more reader-friendly and clean without strange spacing issues that detract from the content itself.

I hope you will agree that this option is an improvement over the last one, and that you can still find what you’re looking for easily.

• Tweet
• Pin It