Blocs Deployment

I bit the bullet today and removed a WordPress site, replacing it with one I created using Blocs. The owner will probably notice and contact me, but seeing as he isn’t paying for me to host the WordPress site or maintain it, I will probably just ignore him.

I also suspect he has less than 10 visitors a month, if any at all.

The process of re-doing the site using the Blocs app was ok. I got a little hung up on the different breakpoint sizes and how much control I could have over the settings on each.

For example, the old WordPress version is around 900 pixels wide on desktop and isn’t responsive, so doesn’t automatically resize for mobile use. Ideally, I would have liked to keep the 900px wide view on desktop and then expand the width more as the screen sizes got smaller, so there was less margin each time.

It was probably the way I was doing it, or the way Blocs handles widths, but I couldn’t achieve this the way I wanted. Each time I tweaked the smaller breakpoint size view, the others were affected too. In the end, I put the maximum screen width at 900px in the overall project settings and then applied a small margin each side of the page. It pretty much works, but did mean that I had to create a new CSS class with the width and borders I wanted and apply it to each “Bloc” (container) on each page. If I didn’t, the content went right across the screen, at 100% width.

However, I did rework his original logo, which was a pencil drawing of a guitar player and then his name in a script type font next to it. As the device sizes got smaller, the logo wasn’t readable, so I created a new one with the image on top and script underneath. I then set this to show only on the smaller device sizes.

I found that Blocs has a contact form available from their built in components, which I tested and it works fine. I think all of the handling is done by Javascript, but this was all automatically included when I exported the files for FTP upload. I am sure there is a way to upload to FTP direct from Blocs, but I use Transmit, a separate Mac FTP client, an app I have used for many years now.

I moved the existing WordPress files into a separate folder, just in case the owner complains. Be interesting to see if he ever realises I have tweaked it.