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Updated on June 14, 2022
If you’ve been visiting the site at all lately, you’ll notice I’ve revised Anthony’s Notes yet again. A few of the revisions are listed below.
New theme and basic changes
I switched the theme to something I thought would be a bit different from the previous theme, GeneratePress. At first, I found myself indecisive about what theme to go with. However, things went much faster once I wrote a list in Google Docs outlining what I wanted in a new theme. After some sorting the remaining candidates along those criteria, I selected the current theme, Beetle.
As for why my site doesn’t look like Barbie designed it, I always use a child theme for WordPress themes. A child theme is a subsidiary WordPress theme that lets one make changes to the main theme without losing them to theme updates. It also keeps the original theme’s code as-is otherwise, though inherits everything about the original that the child theme doesn’t change.
Besides changing the colors of the theme’s links and decorative features, I also altered the footer (to add my own copyright information), added italicized text to the theme’s captions, prevented the theme from generating unnecessary extra images, and aligned the sidebar items’ bullets. I also integrated a few changes I used in previous themes, including a dummy image for the related posts feature (for posts where I didn’t use any images).
Featured images in the RSS feed
Another change I made is adding featured image support to the blog’s RSS feed. While featured images are convenient, those images didn’t appear in RSS readers like Feedly. I found online the following code, which I added to the functions.php child theme file:
function rss_post_thumbnail($content) {
global $post;
if(has_post_thumbnail($post->ID)) {
$content = '<p>' . get_the_post_thumbnail($post->ID) .
'</p>' . get_the_content();
}
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'rss_post_thumbnail');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'rss_post_thumbnail');
Mobile friendly tables
Finally, the other major change is making tables I’ve used on the site more mobile-friendly. For this one, I used a plugin (Magic Liquidizer Responsive Table), plus followed the “adding and editing tables” instructions listed here. Hopefully, information I’ve put into tables, such as in the comics sales posts, will be much more readable on mobile devices.
If you have any questions or concerns, please list them in the comments below.
