Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

Adjusting the Lightword theme for WordPress

I got a report today from a long time friend and colleague about some difficulty he was having with my blog. It seems that his view of the pages were lacking the date "tabs" to the left of the content column. He quickly confirmed that when I sent him a snippet of a screenshot (quick shout out to M. Evans, the author of Abduction!, which is an absolutely fantastic tool for capturing all or portions of browser content).

I'd never noticed this before, for a number of reasons. First (and foremost), while I don't run my browser fullscreen, my ThinkPad's native resolution is 1400x1050, which provides for ample real estate so the left side of my screen was not cut off; next, on mobile devices, I use the (absolutely amazing) WPTouch plugin for WordPress, which renders the content in a much more legible format on small devices; and last, I simply haven't accessed my pages from lower resolution laptops and desktops (shame on me - seriously; I always criticize web designers for doing just that same thing and not paying attentioin to what other people might be using).

Sure enough, the otherwise excellent css in Lightword seems to have a minor shortcoming, namely, when narrowing the browser window, the display actually cuts off the tabs on the left, almost down to the left left edge of the blog title and the content column. While the scrollbar will move across to access the menu(s) on the right, there is simply no way to read the "extra" bits on the other side.

The fix was simple enough, thankfully. All that's required is a minor edit to style.css in the theme directory, changing:

/* LAYOUT */
#wrapper{margin:0 auto;text-align:left;}

to something like:

/* LAYOUT */
#wrapper{margin:0 auto;padding-left:50px;text-align:left;}

The padding causes the left side to narrow almost to the edge of the date tabs, now.

You may try this for yourself, by contrasting the behavior on my blog with, say, the author's.

Thanks for letting me know about this one, Dave!

Last Updated on September 18th, 2012 by LewisR