Wesley's Tool-Box

With major tasks at the workplace wrapped up, I decided that the National Foundation Day holiday would be a good time to upgrade the Mac mini server from El Capitan (OS X 10.11) to Sierra (OS X macOS 10.12). For a warm-up, I upgraded the MySQL Server installation from 5.6 to 5.7 before that, but I ran into some weird issues and took about an hour to resolve. After getting MySQL to work again, I made a full system backup and installed Sierra. With the new OS in place, I restored the server configuration and now you see that the website is back in action. iPhone 7 review will resume shortly.

It's been more than a month since I revamped the site to be mobile friendly. Yet it takes quite a bit of time for Google to re-crawl all those pages and realize that they're have been changes. As you can see here, Google Mobile Usability Report still thinks roughly 15% of the indexed pages still aren't mobile friendly despite the fact that the template update affected the entire site at once. These pages would still show up in the search results without the "Mobile Friendly" tag and be ranked lower. I guess I'll have to wait a few more weeks.

For the past few days, you may have noticed that the website had received further updates in addition to some changes done earlier. Most notably, I modified some underlying code so that the menu bar is properly multilingual - it'll show in the selected language only. In addition, the tagging function got Korean localization. But I didn't stop there because there had been some requests from mobile users that I couldn't ignore.

With a responsive web design, the sidebar that used to be always present next to the main page gets moved to the bottom when the screen isn't wide enough, most notably on mobile devices. Because of this, functions available on the sidebar would become hard to find when viewed on a smartphone.

To rectify this problem, I decided to make further modifications to introduce some of the elements in the sidebar into the top area of the website as long as overall design could be preserved. First thing to try was the language selection box. After much experimenting, it was placed into the menu bar as the first item. This would also be nicely shown on a mobile version's navigation, as you can see here.

Unfortunately, the navigation itself didn't let the user know that they could change the website's language from there when it's collapsed and hiding everything within. So I gave it a label, so even a first time visitor would know now.

Next was the search box in the banner. The new theme uses the one that triggers the internal "quicksearch" function. While this gives you a nice list of posts that you're looking for, it's very slow in reality and doesn't work with the tagging plugin. So I decided to replace this with the Google custom search engine, which was already in the sidebar.

With the integration done, the now-redundant sidebar elements were removed. This is it for now, but if you have more suggestions, feel free to comment.