The tweetable answer is that I switched to the Satellite theme. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Twitter’s philosophy (and I don’t tweet anyway), so U can get a wry take on the sometimes quirky path of progress by reading the rest of this post.
When I started blogging, I wanted a genuinely uncluttered theme that would leave me free to concentrate on content and decide whether I wanted to continue, w/o paying upfront with $ (for a premium membership) and with time (spent customizing). I wanted black text in a sans serif font on a white background, with lines long enough and vertically separated enough for a readable brief essay w/o too much scrolling. I also wanted something that was (and still is?) rare among uncustomized themes: I can print out a preview of a draft, get hard copy that looks very much like what the browser displays, and scribble notes about revisions. Yes, I am that old.
Browsing the theme catalog was a dreary experience, and I found that the only good way to see what my own stuff would really look like was to adopt a theme temporarily and hope nobody was turned off by how ugly my blog was before I found and switched to something better. After several false starts, I settled on Academica.
A post on Horizon Feedback on 2015-09-14 asked users to beta test changes to “the” WordPress.com editor (the “Beep-beep-boop” editor reached from the WordPress interface with a blue top bar). Tho I usually used the other editor (the “Classic” editor reached from the WordPress interface with a black top bar), I decided to help out a little. Improvements in “the” editor might lead me to use it more and enjoy the nice colors.
I started drafting a post, observed the result of clicking the [Preview] button, and submitted a comment including the complaint that
What comes up … is horizontally truncated, with the 1st letter of each line flush against a sky blue border on the left and the last few letters of each line hidden under a vertical scroll bar for the frame containing the draft purportedly being previewed.
Sheri at WordPress looked into the problem promptly and found that it was 2-fold.
- The preview was coming up in tablet mode, with no provision for changing the mode to either desktop/laptop or phone.
- My theme was not responsive to the kind of device (desktop/laptop, tablet, or phone?) in use.
Sheri and friends fixed #1 soon after, adding buttons that would let a blogger working at (say) a desktop/laptop see how the previewed post would look on (say) a phone:
Fixing #2 by switching to a responsive theme would of course be my responsibility, and now I could see how utterly unreadable my posts were to anybody browsing on a phone rather than a real computer. Remembering how dreary theme shopping was, my initial reaction was curmudgeonly. I was writing for people who use real computers, not people who surf while standing in line at Starbucks, so I would stay with Academica.
On the other hand, I can remember when the only real computers filled rooms with refrigerator-sized boxes and ran up huge electric bills for power and cooling. I have also been a frequent visitor to a nursing home and noticed that the aides could sometimes get a brief respite from their jobs by enjoying things like cat videos on their phones. However unlikely it was that an aide might want to read my blog on a quick break, they should not be forced to look elsewhere just because I am an old fart with an unresponsive theme. So I resolved to fix #2. Someday.
When someday finally came in 2016-04, I found that theme shopping is easier now, with a preview capability that lets me see how one of my own posts would look on a phone rather than just how a demo would look on a computer. I also had plenty of my own posts to play with. With some experience in blogging, I was willing to forego printed previews. I could tolerate crappy printing and be content with a theme whose perversities in displayed pages either were minor enough to ignore or could be worked around by adding attributes to a few HTML tags. (As a frugal Yankee, I still wanted to avoid paying for extensive customization unless I actually needed it.) Several themes looked OK until I saw what they did to block quotes: they maimed them with an ugly distracting decoration. I was a big user of block quotes and did not know how to work around this sin. I did know how to work around Satellite’s sin of using an absurdly light font color for block quotes, and I can bypass the use of a similar font color for my tag line by not having a tag line.
So I switched to Satellite and went over all my posts, retrofitting them with a few workarounds, a few small unrelated updates I had been intending to do someday, and a few small wording changes to make the flow of text around narrow images look good on all devices. Only 1 post required nontrivial rearranging to look good on a phone. The whole process took roughly 4 times longer than I had expected, as is common in software engineering.
There is a great virtue of Satellite that should be mentioned: the retractable sidebar. Apart from the click-me-for-a-menu button at the top, the retracted sidebar is an unobtrusive black band along the left side of the post. Clicking that button reveals widgets like the [Follow] button and the Search box.
Press the [Enter] key after entering a few words, and U will get a display of that search’s hits. There is just 1 hit for the specific words illustrated here:
Clicking on the title of that search’s single hit will visit a whimsical introduction to one of the 20-th century’s epistemological earthquakes. It’s OK if U don’t give a rat’s ass for epistemology; the secret revealed at the end is useful in daily life and does not depend on anything else in the post. Even if U skip the post’s mental exercise, please do consider why I displayed a screen shot with the search words instead of putting them in the text of this post. Extra credit for all who can explain how the answer to that question relates to the earthquake.
Mellow Curmudgeon 
