Broken Layout…

You may notice that the blog looks different. The theme I used before, “Textbook”, was broken and showing some ugly frames while not showing some of the featured images.

It was working fine with Edge, but not with Chrome or Firefox. I had been waiting for a couple days, but since nothing changed, I took a look at other available themes. Unfortunately, it seems that you can’t pay for a theme anymore and need to instead upgrade your plan in order to use certain themes.

I got to choose from the free ones and the ones available with the Personal Plan which is what I am using. There are still plenty of themes to choose from! But it’s frustrating that most of them seem to rely on images only.

I am now using “Nook” which looks very “old school”. It has a sidebar which I like. I just need to customize it and try to bring back some of the widgets that I had. But I fear that a lot of them were old widgets and can’t be used anymore.

I switched to OnyxPulse which I like better as it features a dark layout and I got used to having a focus on featured images with the subject line to show the recent blog posts.

Usually, I can handle change. But this just leaves me frustrated because nothing looks like I want it to look. But I don’t want to pay so much extra money to upgrade my subscription – especially as we need to save money, not spend more money.

I may or may not experiment further with other layouts before I commit to one and try to tweak it to my liking. Not that there is that much tweaking to do, as different colours are also a paid feature! But at least, I can change the header menu, add something to the footer area and customize the sidebar, if the layout has one.

In closing, a funny note: The Jetpack settings features an AI assistand that you can use to generate feedback on your blog post, especially the content structure. It usually tells you to add a closing statement or summarize what you mentioned before and so on. When writing this post, I was wondering if, given the content, the AI feedback would be different. And it is! It reads like I was redirected to the Helpdesk Bot instead.