jhaber31

Thanks for clearing that up. I was scared, but it seems to work out as you say.

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 3 months, 4 weeks ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 3 months, 4 weeks ago by jhaber31.

Well, to continue the story, at risk of driving you crazy or, if I haven’t already, driving you away, I did try adding something to the css governing the bulk of my site, in plain ht l. It falls below the style for sidebar, so that taken together the lines read like this:

sidebar { height: 100%;

         float: left;
         padding: 12px }

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

This time on my phone, as yesterday, the sidebar graphic menu has not vanished migrated to the top (which would be acceptable, perhaps). And the rest is now a bit small in type and a bit not fitting, but not too far off from screen width.

Today’s change turns out to affect not every page, but only the single page to which I added a viewport meta tag yesterday. Well, I better give up. Experiment can take me only so far.

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.

You have a point about php. It’d have the advantage of allowing me not to repeat some elements on every page, particularly the stacked images that make up the menu (in html, as div for wrapper and sidebar above my content) the corresponding image map (in html, below my content.

I wouldn’t mind the learning curve. Still, either way, with or without php, it means changing every page, so it’s scary to contemplate, and I may have to put it off. I don’t have a lot of free work days!

Incidentally, while I didn’t start with a template and php, I automated the process of coding new material a bit. Sometimes I take a default new page in my html editor and stuff in content. Sometimes I copy an existing review and overwrite its content. Most often, I rely on a Word macro I created years ago. I can’t say I could do it today.

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by jhaber31.

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 4 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by jhaber31.

Thank you so much. That was interesting and clear, and I appreciate your taking the time to look at my html. Somehow it never occurred to me to worry about whether versions have changed over the years, as of course they must, or perhaps I turned away from the question, given how much I’d invested in existing html. (Well, I did obviously take the trouble to take into account https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml at some point, since the site began in 1994 or 1995.)

I must admit I’m sorry to get the point now that the statement goes in html, not css (although no doubt the latter would still address column width and so page width). I don’t have templates but more than a thousand separate html pages by now. When I started, I hadn’t even heard of php, and later I just continued in my ways, again because of the time it would take to change. That’s for the static html pages that take up the backbone of my site, not the home-page blog in WordPress.

So it may be that, short of undertaking a huge task, I may have to stick to thinking about the latter. As I say, I had help with it as I was new to WordPress, so I never learned a theme structure as well as I should. I just looked at the header, body, and sidebar php pages and the single css page afer he had drafted them based on the WordPress Classic theme and my existing html and css. Even now, I’m going to have to learn what to make of the rest of the theme’s many php pages. But I’ve taken way too much of your time, so I’ll leave it there.

• This reply was modified 4 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 4 months ago by jhaber31.
• This reply was modified 4 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 4 months ago by jhaber31.

That’s really helpful, thanks. I’d seen online recommendations for 16 pt type (which was startling for me, so used to 11.5 pt in MS Word) and how to begin with viewport. I could even, then, allow the text column to grow.

But no question I’ll have to address the issue of screen width, and it’s good advice to consider a more modern look. Thanks for looking at the site as well. (Right now I’m swamped, but hope to get back to this soon.)

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.

Apologies. I wasn’t clear. First, I am well aware that most people rely on their phones now. I did wonder whether it was worth changing my existing style accordingly. A close friend finds it legible as is, but I sure do not.

Second, I’m aware that, if I make a transition, it need not entail a second css. As I understand it, one can, say, place a media query within the css, to adjust elements, making it a responsive style, and not in the html header to call up a media-specific css. (As it happens, many of my site’s headers link to a second style sheet for printing, no doubt unncessary but it works, and I did my work so many years ago that I’ve forgotten how it knows to go with printing.)

Third, alas, I’ll still have a serious learning curve and some tough decisions. For instance, while I’d probably suppress the sidebar to make more space, I’d lose the feature to search my site by artist name, unless I added it somewhere in the remaining column. I’d also need help with technical details. (Say, where to place the media query, what font size to specify, whether to suppress a column with display: none, a width of 0, or something else.)

Last, while free themes from WordPress may already be site-responsive, it’s not just that I’d have to test them. (And honestly, I do know that such themes exist, for goodness sake!) It’s also that I really need to work with my own style. It adjusts to my content choices and to an appearance that goes with content about contemporary artists and art history. If I go with one of those Hallmark images in the free themes, my readers would gag. Your link only shows me the bad choices.

Thanks for your patience, but I think I got it. Before my last comment, I had tried dragging and dropping, but it failed. I now see that going a bit slower, moving the module around a bit and waiting a bit until a dotted rectangle formed, did the job. With luck, it will hold, and I’m done!

Oh, wait, major breakthrough! After several reboots and, a major change of what has been causing some crashes, returning Windows 11 to a restore point before the most recent update, things are looking more promising.

Now I do see a Publish tab, but no longer in the second, right-hand column. In the first, main column, it appears below the text of a post and above categories and tags. The drop-down from Publish then shows the missing options to save and to preview. Great! Let’s hope it lasts, maybe even past my next Windows update.

Is there a way to restore the Publish menu’s place to the right of a post’s text box?

While my question stands, I did just log into WordPress, selected Users from the left-hand menu, and see myself with a valid email address as administrator.

I did see Screen Options and did try checking all the options, but it makes no difference. Besides, the ones that hadn’t been checked don’t sound as if they had anything to do with empowering new posts and post updates. They were Excerpt, Send Trackbacks, Custom Fields, Slug, and Author. None of them have made an obvious difference. I’m inclined to uncheck them unless you can think of a reason not to.

Is it possible that I’ve lost the privilege to update my own Web site? That’s what the various missing fields (Save, Publish, Preview, Update) could have in common? Is there anything I can do about this? I tried looking at my profile and don’t see an option to declare myself administrator, and I honestly don’t remember how I set up the log-in in the first place quite a few years ago. Meanwhile I can’t add to unpublished posts, publish anything, or save a draft, or correct it. Not good.