Last month I explored the idea of moving my site/blog from WordPress.com to Squarespace. You can read the details here. I’ve decided to stick with WordPress both because I’ve been able to create a format I like and because Squarespace is unable to completely import the content from WordPress.
Jetpack is a default and required add-on to WordPress.com. It provides security components and speeds up page loading. Unfortunately, it creates a problem where the Squarespace import tool has difficulty importing some images. It took over a week for Squarespace tech support to escalate and sort this out. In the meantime, I played with the look of my WordPress site and am happy with the result.
I did have a couple of small problems with the “Sapor” theme I’m using but WordPress support quickly helped me fix things yesterday. This was my second time reaching out to WordPress support and they were great both times.
My first problem with the theme was that hyperlink text (that’s the text you click on to go to a different page on a site or a different website altogether (Like that “read the details here” link a couple of paragraphs above . On my site, the links were not differentiated at all, so you couldn’t see when some text was a link to a different page/site. I tried a change or two, but wasn’t completely successful. Within 15 minutes of chatting with a WordPress support person I got the fix I wanted. Fantastic.
My second fix was for the blog summary posts on the main page. I used to have the full blog posts one after another on the home page. One reason I picked the Sapor theme was that it allows for having a summary for each post that you can click on a post to read more. The summary text can be created in two ways. The default way is for the the summary to display the first few lines of a post followed by a “Continue reading” link.
The second way to create text for the summary is to manually write an exerpt. However, the Sapor default does not automatically provide a “Continue reading” link.
You can still get to the full post by clicking the title or the picture, but link text would be better.
A quick search of the web showed how to add the “Continue reading” link. Simply add an HTML <a> tag to the excerpt text. I’ve done it for this post. (Notice that the “Reading” is capitalized here unlike for the default.) It’s a little more work, requiring me to post the entry, get the link, then go back and update the excerpt. But not big deal.
My third fix was in the menu structure. I want to create pages showing sample pictures from various cameras I’ve used. But I don’t want to have to have a separate menu link for each camera. The WordPress support person gave me some ideas on how to create sub-menus in the theme I’m using. Now I have a menu item called “Camera Samples” – you can see it over there on the left side of the page.
You can see the little drop-down triangle/arrow to the right. If you click that, you’ll see a sub-menu of the cameras. (Right now, I only have a page of pictures from my old Sony RX100M1.
That’s a LOT of information about the technical details of my blog. Thanks for reading. If you are not subscribed to my blog (for example if you clicked a link from a Facebook post) please consider adding your e-mail address in the “Subscribe” section on the upper left side of this page. You’ll get an e-mail each time I create a new post. I won’t spam you and I don’t sell the list to anyone.
