Spanking Blog: A New Look For Smaller Screens
Hey, everybody! I’m pleased to announce (about five years late) a new template for Spanking Blog that’s a lot friendlier to use on the small screens of mobile devices. It’s not perfect (a lot of the former sidebar material appears below the newest posts, making for too much vertical scrolling on really small screens) but it should be much easier to use on all kinds of screens, rather than being optimized purely for the rapidly-vanishing desktop computer.
Please check it out on your portable device of choice (as well as on whatever desktop setup you use) and let me know what you think! I’m especially interested in reports of it being hopelessly broken and ugly at a particular screen size or on a specific device, browser, or operating system that you use.
Expect some minor tweaks going forward as I continue to play with it. Please pardon the dust!
You can use CSS media queries to display different layouts on different screen sizes. It’s useful for showing sidebars on large monitors and single column layouts on small handheld devices. Fluid percentage widths are your friend too :)
Thanks, Pandora! I actually am using the media queries to hide some less-essential stuff at smaller screen sizes. But I wasn’t willing to dispense with the former sidebar material *entirely*, which means I’m locating some of it in what I’m mentally calling “nav bars” interspersed with the posts on the front page and below the post on the “single post” pages. At the sizes of modern phablet large-screen phones, it’s not too bad, but on really old devices (320px screens) there’s so much of it (even after I tell the least essential chunks to stop displaying at those widths) that it takes some thumbing to scroll through it. I did a first-pass spring cleaning while I was redesigning, but Mary Poppins would not be impressed. I really need to go back in and designate a bunch more stuff to be vanished with the media queries at small sizes.
It looks like it is formatted for mobile even on my desktop. The sidebars aren’t on the side anymore
Yeah, SpankFan, that’s deliberate. It lets me start posting bigger photos and it simplified the redesign, which was heavily tasking my very limited tech abilities. A lot of sites are going to one-column designs these days — and although I have my doubts about the trend, I decided to try it out at least for a while. (I may decide I hate it and code sidebars that only appear at wide screen widths.)
I’m using one of those rapidly-disappearing desktop, 1280×720 (720p television). I see one of those “nav bars” between posts 1 and 2 and the other between posts 2 and 3. Having the most recent post “on top” isn’t so strange, but it’s a bit jarring to run into another one after post 2. Also, as a user with a wide screen, I can definitely see the utility of making things go back to sidebars on wide screens.
Thanks for the feedback, Ken. I’m sort of guessing at where to put them. They were lower down in earlier versions of the design, and I may move them lower again once people are used to the notion that they are “down there somewhere” if they need them.