OK, now that I have some reasonable stability with WordPress, I might as well do the final tweaks to make it work well. It is pretty confusing to change appearance because WordPress has its primitive mechanism, so most theme builders are building on top of that. I’ve been using the SwipeWP and it has some nice controls in the Appearance section, but here is how to get a Top menu and put something in the footers
Top Menu
The main concept here is that you want the main things like your Podcasts or your Mastodon Friends/RSS Feeds on a separate page for reading. So the way to get this is Wp Admin > Appearance > Menus and assign these:
- The Mastodon Friends Plugin creates a
/friendsrout, so you create a custom link that does this. - You can create real pages like say a Podcast page and note there is an Auto add pages option.
- Note that the menuing system even let’s you put categories or tags in a certain place which is helpful if you are disciplined about tagging (which I’m not)
- For instance, you could create a Family category or even one for Apple things and it’s nice to have a sub-blog for those items which you can edit in WP Admin > Posts > Categories or Tags for that matter. For me to make this work would require large-scale re-editing.
- Click on the Save menu when done
Footer Editing: Works better on WordPress.com
For some reason, editing the footers causes a hang when using the native WordPress tools on my site, but works fine when doing it from WordPress.com, I suspect that this is because with WordPress.com, it is just using the backend APIs which are much less load on my little server, but to add Privacy and Terms of Service and other small things like that:
- Start WordPress.com then go to Appearance > Menus or WP Admin > Customize > Menu is much faster than WP Admin > Appearance > Menus which is more bare bones and seems to use a lot of CPU.
- Now you can add links for these pages, remember that you can have relative links with just a slash without the HTTP, so to get to say your local privacy page, hyperlink to
/privacy
Blogrolls: Have gone out of style but you can use with a menu
But in the old days, you would have a menu of blogs that you would read. No one really uses that anymore and I think the Friends section is somewhat better in that you can read what I read, but I’m reinstalling one. You need to use a Menu with custom links to your favorite sites and then add it as a Widget.
Remaining problems: redis temporary hang for things like Widgets try the SwipeWP Theme controls
I’ve found that certain parts of the user interface hang a lot, for instance the WP Admin > Appearance > Menus hangs with all kinds of errors, but if you go to the same thing from a different part of the user interface WP Admin > Theme > Customize > Widgets it works fine. Again, I think this has to do with the amount of rendering done and it seems like the folks at SwipeWP did a great job.
As another example if you use the native WP Admin > Appearance > Widgets, you get all kinds of hangs, but coming through WP Admin > Themes > SwipeWP > Customize > Footer Settings or the equivalent WordPress.com > Appearance > Customize.
With the CPU at 80-100% and memory at 70%, this is to be expected, but for $12 a month, it’s pretty amazingly good.
