The New Layout That Never Happened

(Img 1) Layout I tested with

Back in 29 May (of 2016 mind you, not 2013 as time stamped in previous post), you may have noticed that my blog had a totally different layout for a few hours that looked somewhat plain and broken. Don't worry, it wasn't hacked.

So what happened?

(Img 2) Layout I had before testing (Did I block ads on my own blog? lol)

Here's the thing. I have been to various sites and thought about how dated my blog layout  was underneath modern fonts and colour schemes that you see. The fonts used relied on the fonts you had installed, instead of HTML5's download a specified font feature, which are Gill Sans and Calibri. Both pre installed in certain operating systems, or installed alongside with other programs you installed. I can't guarantee the blog would be rendered as I saw if you don't have those fonts installed, like Arial... The point here is it's just like adding a new coat of paint to something old.

In Img 1, at where Chasing After Rainbows is, was supposed to be a logo. The problem is that I do not have one. The black bar above it, and below the story navigation menu (not visible), are links to various social media places like Facebook, Instagram, Prinstest. I do not have accounts to those (or want to publicly link to), with the odd absence of sites that I do want to link missing in the template. This is why it seemed oddly empty with only Twitter and YouTube. When you hover over Main, 日本語, and Other Blogs, a sub-menu would appear linking to other Pages of that blog and other blogs I have that cleans up the clutter the older layout had.

But here is what made me decide on changing it back. (Yes, it was meant to be a new layout, and not a testing one.)

Broken widgets

Rather blatantly obvious in Img 1 is a blank widget named DDDDDD. There was supposed to have the template's style of displaying my bio right there, but it wasn't working. The name came out of frustration of it not working and checking if I was even editing the right widget as, along with other widgets, had HTML/CSS in the name if I didn't give it any.

There is a widget that you could tab between the popular posts and the latest post, but only the most popular posts (which were all strangely from around 2008 or 2011) worked. On the other tab, it showed a totally different tab. I double checked to make sure it wasn't a widget beneath it. I could not find the widget that showed my latest post anywhere else.

Editing blog settings

I don't like editing the blog settings, or creating new widgets to add their custom code that contains ID specific code, just to make the new template work. Don't remember what I changed, but one setting was to hide the date at the top, and enable the bottom. Looking for the date there is just not my thing. If viewing the blog's pages, there would just be an awkward / (forward slash) by itself at the bottom.

What I did not do when reverting to the old layout was not re-enabling that row of icons to social media sites. I found it unnecessary. Also, removed Ask.fm because I've been getting too many sexual and privacy-invasive questions that I just refuse to answer, and chose not to reveal themselves when I disallowed people asking me questions anonymously.

Template is not optimized for my content

Regular visitors would notice that my blog is text-heavy. However, the template I used was designed for posts that includes photos, plus text of length that are shorter than my typical posts.

From the main page, you would see a short snippet of what I write before being prompted to click on a link to view more, a feature I have actually used before, but abandoning it because I got lazy it was troublesome to implement. The amount of text you could see before it got cut off was just too short. Shade of grey used was too light to read comfortably for long periods.


With so many things compromised from how it was supposed to be that resulted in an uncomfortably bright colour scheme, and making my blog looking very empty, I just can't accept it as the new layout.

I'm not sure about switching from the old layout (1) to the new layout (2) for the blog. Looks... empty. pic.twitter.com/rEhr7s6EKo

— HarukaT (@takhsiru) 2016年5月29日