All Change : Responsive and mobile and all that jazz

 

If you’ve been near oracle-base.com recently you will see things have changed a bit…

The Main Website

For a couple of weeks I’ve been playing with Bootstrap and Font Awesome to make the main body of the website mobile friendly. Last night I got a bit bored so I decided to shift the whole site to the responsive mobile template so it’s a single look and feel regardless of the device.

Less than 5% of my traffic is from mobiles and tablets, so that wasn’t really the motivation for doing this. Over the years I’ve accumulated a whole bunch of crappy code to deal with specific situations and it was getting a little hard to manage the basic framework of the website. The switch to using Bootstrap meant I could effectively throw a whole bunch of my code away, making my life much easier. The main goal has been to keep everything plain and clean and minimize the amount of time I spend on maintenance. That leaves me more time to work on content, which is the important thing. The whole responsive thing was an added bonus.

It’s a work-in-progress. There are still some things to neaten up a little.

  • There are some pages that are “less responsive” than they should be. 🙂
  • I keep tweaking font sizes and colours.
  • I’ve got to sort out the main image in the navigation bar.

Overall, I’m relatively happy with it and it seems to work fine in the browsers I’ve tried (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari) and the mobiles and tablets I’ve tried it on.

The Blog

I switched the blog to the “Twenty Fifteen” theme a few days ago. The old theme was getting a bit long in the tooth and required an ugly plugin to be make it mobile enabled.

I’m not totally happy with the “Twenty Fifteen” theme, but it will do until I find something I prefer. My main criteria is it has to be really plain. 🙂

Comments?

If anyone has any comments or suggestions I would be happy to hear them.

Cheers

Tim…

Updates:

  • Praveen : Mentioned the lack of direct links to the version-specific article pages. I missed them too, so I put them back in for larger browsers. On smaller devices they don’t show as they make the page look messy.
  • Frankly : Noticed the copy/paste was not working correctly. It turned formatted text into a single line and added a site URL on to it. This was down to an incorrect ShareThis.com setting for my sharing buttons. I flipped the switch and copy/paste is working again now.

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

5 thoughts on “All Change : Responsive and mobile and all that jazz”

  1. Hi Tim !
    Great to see it ! I liked it !
    The previous sub title for “Articles” to navigate for a specified version or Product was faster, great and pretty eye-catching !

    Cheers,
    Praveen

  2. If only the starting page “oracle-base.com ” is opened it hides the “title” Bar.
    Do you want the visitor must accept cookes 🙂
    Cheers,
    Praveen

  3. Praveen :

    I hate that cookie thing but it is EU law now, so it is better to comply. You should only have to accept it each time you clear your cache. 🙂

    I know what you mean about the sub-tab thing. I liked that too, but it doesn’t really work with the new format.

    I’ll see if there is some way to resurrect that without mashing up the site…

    Cheers

    Tim…

  4. Praveen : I’ve put some quick links back on each page. 🙂 It hides when the screen width is too small. 🙂

    Cheers

    Tim…

  5. Hi Tim 🙂
    That looks incredible !!!
    Very good idea ! to put that in that way for fast navigation !

    Cheers
    Praveen
    PS : Oh yes, I do comply with EU rules as I’m living in Frankfurt for a decade. Living in Germany I got to comply EU as well as Germany’s rules 🙂
    With pleasure I can accept only this site’s cookies but not anyone’s heheh 🙂

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