Earlier this year, I wanted to fix something that’s been bugging me for the longest time. On this blog, dates would show up to the left of post names. When I first set this up, with a kind of obtuse styling, I got the dates to line up in one “column” on the left, and then the post names to all start from the same invisible vertical line on the right.
It looked straight and perfect, but the columns were a hassle.
As soon as the post titles were too long, they would wrap under the dates on the left. No more two columns! My facade is exposed.
I could fix it by making two proper columns, with a table and a lot more styling and edge cases to consider.
Not wanting to spend time on this, I took a roundabout approach to solving the problem of long post titles wrapping into the dates.
I made two radical changes to avoid this altogether, which gave it a fresh look at the same time. I got rid of the day of the month, since knowing whether it was published on May 15 or May 23 doesn’t make a difference with my writing. I then moved the month name to the end of the post title, and made it a bit smaller.
Now there are no columns, the wrapping problem disappears, plus it looks sleek.
This is the roundabout approach to solving problems. Sometimes, it’s better to do it a different way that causes the problem to not exist in the first place.