If in recent days, you have arrived on my blog for the first time, you won’t notice any difference. But if you are a regular visitor, maybe checking up as to whether I’ve actually written a new post, then you will have noticed that its appearance has changed. And having not written and posted here for over three months, this is the perfect reason for me to get blogging again.
Back in July, I received a message saying that my PHP needed updating. PHP is a general-purpose scripting language that powers my blog. Apparently, my PHP was 8.0.30 when it should now be 8.3. As things such as this are beyond my competence, I contacted my technical guru to ask whether she could help and she kindly updated me almost straight away.
A few weeks later, my technical guru wrote saying that, whilst updating my PHP, she had noticed that my WordPress theme, the way my blog appears, was no longer supported by the developers and was therefore a security risk. It was time for a change.
Amazingly, the last time I changed my WordPress theme was over thirteen years ago. This post describes what happened then. I have since altered the blog header from being an Anglican in Prague to being an Anglican in Bohemia & Saxony, but no other changes have been made to the appearance of my blog, until now.
My new theme has the slightly bland title of ‘Twenty Sixteen’. But it is clear and uncluttered and, most importantly, it is secure. I like it and I’d be interested for feedback from any of my regular visitors.
Inevitably, changing theme has slightly disrupted a few earlier posts. In particular, any text that is at the side of a photo at the beginning of a post, sometimes has large gap in it mid-sentence, before continuing under the photo. I’ve managed to solve this problem a few times, by hyphenating a long word – for example making Frauenkirche, Frauen-kirche. But if any reader spots a similar problem, please let me know, either by commenting on this post or using the contact link in the right-hand sidebar.
Whilst I prefer to read things on the internet, using my laptop computer on which I’m compiling this post, I am aware that many people read things almost exclusively using their mobile phones. One positive result of updating my WordPress theme is that the blog is now much easier to read on an Android mobile phone. Well it certainly is on mine 😉
Nice update — the new layout looks clean and readable. Quick question: on mobile, do older posts with side-by-side images still shift text oddly in browsers other than Chrome? I’ll report any examples if I spot them.
In answer to your question, I honestly don’t know.