A New Moon, Goodbye Simple and Hello Soho
| Thankfully, the kitten is optional. |
Don't adjust your set as you have landed on The Moon, it is just a New Moon due to Google finally releasing some funkay new responsive themes. For years, the only responsive option was the Dynamic theme, but it is a bit of a workaround as all it does is present posts using the blog feed, with very little scope to make changes to the template design, along with limitations and slow load times for the mobile view.
The new themes have multiple types of responsiveness, depending on the screen size of your device and there is a big improvement for mobile viewing.
The Moon was using the old Simple template, but much modified with quite a bit if gadget jiggery pokery, includeing embedded Feedwind widgets to show Moon Shares and the latest Moonblogsfromsyb posts.
I have gone with the Soho option, as it allowed me to keep the background design as simple as possible. Thankfully, virtually all the jiggery pokery stuff does transfer across and some in an enhanced fashion. The most complicated part was getting the mobile view not to show gadgets, which was the opposite of what is the case with the Simple template. Thankfully, I was able to sort it with a bit of cut and paste* HTML editing thanks to obhiabablog - using the conditional tags.
Feedwind has also been improved to allow the title and text of posts to be different sizes and to limit the widget size to a number of posts of different lengths. The code within the widget is no longer editable so you can't remove the slightly more prominent Feedwind logo. It also seems that the page load is more dependent on the Feedwind servers working ok.
It has all resulted in an extra funkay new Moon that is rather similar to certain Drupal powered news websites or fancy paid for Wordpress ones. And it was created without spending a penny, which I doubt is possible in quite the same way on other platforms. As before, it does feature adverts, but not quite the masses you do get on news sites these days, and Google does at least give their bloggers a small slice of the ad revenue cake.
If you Like Share
The only gadget to not come across was the Facebook like button one. But I am not too bothered as I have always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it, especially as all types I tried took ages to load and there was no correlation between the number of likes and page views. Oddly, on the Dynamic template there is a like button, along with the Google+ this page option, but Google have decided to just have share options on the new themes. Liking a page is somewhat half arsed anyway, as it does mean that very few of your "friends" will see it in their feed, so if you do actually like a post then share it.
* Or "great repeal" if you are a Brexshitter.
