Settling in …

Logic Matters seems to be settling comfortably into its new home with a different hosting company, though a fair bit remains to be done.

For a start, pages now load much faster (mostly, within a second or two). The laggardly behaviour on Bluehost was an annoyance, a major reason for moving in the first place, so it is good that Siteground is indeed considerably snappier.The new Astra theme is, as they say, “responsive” (meaning that it knows whether you are on a computer, tablet or mobile, and makes visual adjustments accordingly).To help keep pages loading fast, I have kept things simple (with e.g. a minimal number of plugins.).  And I’m really pretty happy with the understated look’n’feel of Logic Matters on a tablet or mobile. After all, this is basically a wordy text-based site, so visual drama seems inappropriate. On a desktop, if you open a big window then you do get a really boring expanse of grey around the content areas. But replacing that with even a very low-key abstract background gives a surprisingly distracting effect; so I’m inclined to keep things as plain as they are. So I hope people like the simple layout (though I’m certainly open to suggestions for fine-tuning. the design)The content of the footer area on tablet/computer pages is a bit unimaginative: but I’m not sure what would be more interesting/useful (again I’m open to suggestions).The blog is now 15 years old (I missed its birthday), but I’m for the moment keeping all the legacy posts online, if only because they are the nearest I have to a diary of recent years. A link-checker tells me that a lot of old links within the blog no longer work but I’m not going to worry about that. I might set up a page, however, linking to past blog highlights (i.e. linking to posts which are mini-essays of one kind or another that might have more than ephemeral interest).One bit of functionality I still need to restore is being able to sign up to notifications of posts. It’s on my to-do list.Meanwhile, I’m rather slowly and sporadically checking/reworking the other, static, pages. In particular, the much-visited LaTeX pages are more than overdue for a bit of attention: but don’t hold your breath — updating these and some other pages always seems to take an inordinate amount of time (if only because web-searches for relevant materials take me off down distracting byways).

I’m glad I made the hosting change and updated to a modern WordPress theme. It’s been a bit of a palaver, because of course you always underestimate the amount of fiddly work involved in this sort of thing. But it’s been worth it, and we’re getting there …

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