Forced road work ahead

Everyone knows that well-traveled roads wear down over time. They develop cracks, then the first potholes appear. Work crews are deployed to patch up the superficial damages. Traffic continues to roll. Then you notice larger surface alterations. And you realize, that the road has a damaged foundation. And you need to do a larger reconstruction, totally removing the old road surface, fix the foundation and then apply a totally new pavement. If you are curious how this analogy applies to the Streets of Nuremberg, continue reading….

Since the inception of this blog in 2016 I have been using the WordPress Suits theme. While maybe not fancy, the design still allowed for a customary header image and a logo (hey, it’s all about the brand), ample space for a custom menu and useful side widgets, effective designing options for blog posts and pages. And I loved the adaptability of the theme depending on the used platform, be it laptop, tablet or smart phone.

While I have been pondering about doing a renovation of the blog and its design for a while, I did not find an attractive alternative theme that fully met my requirements, and the hurdles for changing seemed all to high, so I kept patching up the cracks and continued using “Suits”.

But then a couple of weeks ago I started having serious issues with the functionality of my blog. The “join” button was not working anymore. Statistics that were always there were suddenly missing. I continued my patchwork using custom HTML code and was able to fix some issues. I started questioning myself if my fixes might have broken something else.

Then, two days ago, I noticed that the search function was not working anymore. And I knew I had used it just the week before and it has worked just fine. So I contacted the (always helpful) WordPress support. And you know what I found out? My used (free) Suits Theme had silently gone out of business, is no longer supported by WordPress.

I knew it was already dated when I started using it three years ago. And I can’t blame someone to not supporting it anymore if technology moves on. So that is the broken foundation I was writing about at the start of the post. It forces me to do a full reconstruction work on the Streets of Nuremberg.

The support also told me that there is no going back to my old theme once I change it to something new. Even when I load a new theme to try it out, I will have crossed a point of no return. So it will be a real adventure going to a new blog design. WordPress offers an abundance of themes that I could use. But the above mentioned requirements remain, leaving very little options. I tend to lean to the Baskerville 2 design. It is very similar in functionality to what I have, still has a kind of modernized design that adapts with the used viewing platform.

So I’m putting up the road work signs on this blog. As I’m more the haptic, trial and error type, I’m implementing things on the real thing. I’m no friend of shutting down and re-opening once things are completely redone. So there might be some bumps for my readers ahead. Some things might not look sleek for a while, some functions might not be properly working, while I play around to optimize things. Please bear with the dust. As I take The Significant Other into the mountains for a long weekend, I also have no idea how long my reconstruction will take.

But eventually we all will walk the freshly paved Streets of Nuremberg….

Have a great Friday

Marcus

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