jhaber31

I have to thank you. Reducing the page from what was ugly as can be anyhow did the trick. I can get into unforeseen keystrokes and hand movements often with unintended consequences. (Just today I’d reverted to an active touch pad, which can all but prevent me from doing what I do most, typing, without setting it off for the worst with the heel of my hand. I had to disable it once again.)

Thanks, and let me try to work with screen shots. First, here’s what I see on coming into WordPress, and, second, here’s what I see, with a menu sidebar, if I click on the menu icon at upper left. (Note that this isn’t all I see, because the screen dimensions don’t permit a proper full screen capture, but it’ll do.) I liked it better when my default was more like the second, with a menu always handy, but I guess I’ll get used to it. Note, too, once again that by sidebar I’m talking about functionality within the administration of my site, not it’s public face. I’m sorry the other kind person kept returning to that.

Third, here’s the screen for all posts, at least the screen after I scroll down a very little. Note how bare the information is. I located, as your kind direction, Screen Options near upper right, but it has some check boxes for what to show, and they’re all checked, including date. That’s weird. I honestly don’t remember precisely what I saw before these issues a couple of weeks ago, but it definitely included the date. I’d have sworn it also included the tags I’d assigned each post, so I had something more helpful than my deliberately allusive post titles, such as the name of my subject, but if I can’t, I guess I can’t.

Oh drat, my attempt to insert the third image isn’t working. It’s not asking for a URL to link to it as with the others. Maybe if I start another reply. ink

Thir

Thanks, but I’m afraid my message wasn’t clear enough. I wasn’t concerned whether my Web site looks as intended. (The page of museumlistings isn’t in WordPress anyhow. Except for the home page blog, I use mostly static html.) I was talking about the interface for working in WordPress, so that I can add to or change my content. The only sidebar I mean, say, is the one that gives me choices such as viewing past posts.

Thanks. That really is interesting, and tempting. Meanwhile, I keep playing around, and results are sorta improving. I’ve got it to the point that the sidebar menu in WordPress pages really does vanish in both browsers, phone all the time and laptop after after I size the browser window down. Next, I added the viewport meta tag to other navigation pages, such as search by artist or period in history. Their type size properly improved, too.

I always had a in my blog just below the page header and before content, saying to “go beyond the blog,” with links to my search by artist, by history, and by what’s new. It occurred to me that, while it has fewer choices than my graphic menu, it could obviate the graphic menu in a pinch. So I added it to the single static html page I’d been using for a test of how to approach the bulk of my site, apart from the home page in WordPress. And then I changed my style sheet for such pages to make that line show only in larger pages (a media statement with display: none but this time with min-width rather than max-width). Sure enough, now just as the graphic menu vanishes, the new line appears.

I also tried to specify a width for the main column in Word-Press for smaller screens. This hasn’t worked. As I shrink the laptop window or go to the phone, I’m down to that single column (good), but it runs off-screen. Turning the phone sidways fits it just fine, but I’d like to do better. I did clear the cache a lot, as usual. But good guess that this was the problem; it was my instinct, too.

It occurs to me that, again because I didn’t lay out my WordPress theme, I’m not correctly identifying the class governing my main WordPress content. I guess I’ll just have to keep experimenting.

Last, if that last style issue can ever be fixed, applying the fix to all my pages could take just two additions to all those pages, with or without php. First, I’d have to add the meta tag for viewpoint to each. Second, I’d have to add the new substitute for a menu. Still daunting, but thanks for the mention of a search opportunity new to me.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by jhaber31.

I continued to experiment and, so far, failed. Today I stuck entirely to style.css within what I trust is the active WordPress theme.

I changed the header with from 770px to 100px. As I said last time, the content width is 576px. Then I added the following, below the existing lines for #menu:

@media (max-width: 767px) {
#menu {
display: none;
}
}

The good news, once again, is that everything looks the same as ever on my laptop. The bad news is that the sidebar at right hasn’t vanished on my phone, and the large type doesn’t all fit on the screen. (Neither of these happen on my laptop either if I change the browser from full screen to manually sized.) Any idea what I’m doing wrong? Of course, I could have failed to identify correctly the elements in WordPress, so I can play similarly with the html css where I know it well, but I can’t swear that’s it.

I said I’d leave you alone, but may I report on a test I tried? I wanted to do the very minimum, in order to see what works before moving ahead, but easy to undo.

I added the viewport meta tag in two places: (1) the header php for my WordPress theme and (2) the header for a single one of my static html files, https://www.haberarts.com/aalbers.htm. I did not make further changes to the header for doc type and character set. I placed it after such tags and before the ones identifying me and my subject matter.

Things look unchanged on my laptop, which is good. In both cases, on the iPhone type became more legible, maybe even larger than I’d like. (In the html css, the type is set to 97%.) For the html page, the menu in the left sidebar now appears at top, seeming to take care already with no further action to adjust content to screen width. For the WordPress page, where the sidebar is to the right, it does not, and the menu is still to the right.

So far, so good, but not all of the text fits on screen. So I opened the css for both, the one in my WordPress theme and the one for my art reviews. If I have identified the screen elements correctly, the text column is set for 580 in html and 576 in WordPress. Again if I’m correct, the sidebar in html is set for 100%, while I was unable to figure out which setting goes with the menu in WordPress.

So I surfed the Web to see if I could find the correct width for mobile devices. Alas, the answers were all over the map. Any hints as to how I could do better? Thanks. I’m sure my stumbling around in the forum past isn’t the way to go, but I do appreciate it.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by jhaber31.

Oops! That’s sure stupid of me after a lifetime in publishing and all these years online. My eyesight is losing ground, but that’s no excuse!

Oh, while I have you, may I ask where in my stylesheet the viewport statement goes? Of course, currently the stylesheet governs everything, including views from all media.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by jhaber31.

Thanks. We’ll see how it goes. FWIW, my WordPress theme started with a WordPress “classic theme,” but I had freelance help with it, so I never did get to learn how to work with appearances in WordPress. The bulk of my site, the static html pages, go back longer and were my own css, much as I’ve forgotten half of how I did it.