New blog template

Thanks for your patience for the flurry of design experiments and changes to this site over the weekend. No, it’s not because the North Koreans hacked the site again. The culprit is actually Google, which just announced a policy that sites that aren’t mobile-friendly will be buried in SEO rankings. For the last four or five years, this site had been using an extensively hacked version of this template, which I liked very much, but which was also the reason why the site wasn’t mobile friendly. Unfortunately, the developers stopped supporting it a year ago, so there wasn’t a newer version to upgrade to. The majority of my traffic comes from Google searches, so the old template had to go.

Having been forced to change something I liked the way it was, my secondary goal was to change the site’s look and functionality as little as possible. It took many hours of work, about two dozen tries with various templates, and a few hours of stylesheet modifications, but I think I finally got to a reasonable facsimile of last week’s version. One of the things I don’t like is the “read more” buttons at the bottom of each post, whether there’s more to read or not. That’s an incompatibility between the excerpt function and the plugin that overrides it, and I’ll be looking for a solution to that in the coming weeks. One thing I do like is that the site seems to load faster now. Meanwhile, let me know how you like it.