Checkbox: Start Fresh
Despite the time of year, the title here shouldn’t suggest that this is some sort of New Year’s resolutions post. Rather, it’s about some of the latest design tweaks I’ve made since switching the blog over to the Shoreditch theme so that I could stop having to edit theme files and instead focus on plugins and CSS.
For a week or so now I’ve been trying to figure out what CSS changes would be necessary in order for the site when viewed on my 8th-generation iPad, in portrait mode, to include the sidebar but not include the mobile navigation menu. I’d basically figured out the latter but the former was proving to be just incomprehensible enough to not be worth the increasing effort.
This morning, I remembered that in the theme customized, under Additional CSS, there’s an option not to use the theme’s original CSS at all, and this gave me the solution.
To wit: I’ve checked that box, then pasted the entirety of the theme’s original CSS into Additional CSS, save for changing one @media breakpoint back from 896px to 768px, a single change that serves to use the sidebar layout on my iPad but not the mobile navigation menu. Then I went and added the changes to fonts and font sizes, a fix for a layout problem with one of the widgets, and one minor design tweak that had been the entirely of my Additional CSS beforehand.
(Unrelated to all this, yesterday I also switched from using the theme’s full-width “featured” post to a more standard “sticky” setting that maintains the layout of content and sidebar.)
There might be a couple of outstanding glitches, although I haven’t seen any yet, but as usual I’ll deal with those if and when they crop up. For now, I’ve accomplished what’s been nagging at me, which was wanting to see the desktop version on my iPad rather than the mobile one.
Addenda
- I’ve actually reverted my font size changes, save for the date in the post footer, on the theory that the more I keep of the original CSS the less I have to maintain over time.