{"id":20223,"date":"2025-02-05T20:31:15","date_gmt":"2025-02-05T20:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/?p=20223"},"modified":"2025-12-06T20:38:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T20:38:34","slug":"glow-blogs-site-editing-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnjohnston.info\/blog\/glow-blogs-site-editing-adventure\/","title":{"rendered":"Glow Blogs – Site Editing Adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Recently I saw a post<\/a> on Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel pointing to a nice 3 column layout for a blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doug wondered :<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If you\u2019re reading this and know of a similar blog theme, on any platform, could you let me know?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I thought it would be possible to use the Site Editor on a WordPress block theme and left a comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve been watching quite a few WordPress videos from Jamie WP<\/a>. I especially like his Remaking Famous Websites playlist<\/a>. So I thought it might be possible to make a WordPress site that looked a bit like garry.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jamie does these in 30 minutes. This took me longer, but I’ve not a whole lot of experience with the site editor. I decided to use Glow Blogs. It is free and easy for me to set up a site there. I serve as part time product owner<\/em> so this is good practise. The disadvantage is that I can’t install any extra plug-ins or add any custom css1<\/a><\/sup>. Glow Blogs also runs a version or so behind WordPress.org.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I only did enough to see where I could go easily. I didn’t attempt to match styles or other features.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got as far as Three Columns<\/a>, this is not finished or polised but I managed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. 1. a home page with some static content and a left hand navigation.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. a posts page with the same left hand column. A second column listing the posts and loading the latest post in the third column.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. finally a single post page with the same first two columns. The post tapped or clicked in the second column showing in the third.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    To do this I created three page templates2<\/a><\/sup>. All are inside columns. All have the same first column. So I made that one as a pattern3<\/a><\/sup>. The second column is used twice, so I made another pattern for that. This stopped me having to fix the same thing in different places. I think<\/em> this is the right approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I’ve ignored mobile and other possible pages. I didn’t touch archive, views for categories and tags for example . My aim was to spend a couple of hours on this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I had trouble with a few things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n