style_system | (no subject)

(no subject)

Hi, I would like to ask why every new topic and every new page piles up vertically in the form of posts in the main home page? I would like to have separate pages, for each separate category, and when the link on the page is clicked, it opens a whole new page instead of scrolling down the posts! I tried changing the template with other templates, it doesn't help...

I also looked in the settings: Select Journal Style / Customize Journal Style / Test Beta Features, but I didn't find a function to create separate pages anywhere.

I also looked in the CREATE menu, but there is no option to create a new separate page, only Post Entry / Edit Entries, but again I didn't find a function to create separate pages anywhere.

I would be glad if someone with more experience could help, thanks in advance!

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it sounds like you might be looking for a service to build a website, rather than what dreamwidth is. dreamwidth is a journalling site, which is why it is arranged as a journal. everything you're describing about how dreamwidth's layout works, is just the normal layout for journal sites like this.

dreamwidth can be used to make a somewhat website-like interface if you know enough html/css and put some effort into it, but it will always be a journal first and foremost because that's what it's designed for.

if it helps, each post you make on your dreamwidth journal does have its own separate webpage. it's just that they also all display in the main journal feed because that's how journals work. but clicking on the title of a post will take you to its individual page, which does load separately without any of the other posts.

so if you wanted, something you could do is make a sticky post (sticky posts will always stay at the top of the main feed), and fill it with links to each of your other posts, using html and/or inline css to make it look the way you want. then you could use that as a kind of landing page. people would still be able to scroll down to see the posts below it if they wanted, but the links would all be at the top of the feed and would all lead to individual pages.

if that doesn't work for you, you might want to try looking for an actual website-building service, instead. or maybe somebody with better knowledge of css than us (

the_beasts) can give you a better solution that we beasts don't know about. it could be that maybe there's a way to radically alter your journal style with the custom css option, to hide your other posts on the main feed or something, but we beasts personally wouldn't know how to do that, if it's even possible.

as the previous commenter said, most of this is just how the site works, but you might want to look at tags - you can add one or more tags to each post, and then when you click on the tag it will take you to a page with all posts with that tag (or at least the first twenty, with the option to go to further pages of results), which might do some of what you're looking for.

The other commenters have already stated the reason why it's "piling" up, however there ARE ways around this. (RP-ers have all figured them out, lol.)

A way you might want to do this, as long as you're looking to mainly apply it to your own journal and not your reading page, is by tagging your entries by topic.

Then you can do a few different things to have a central navigation as your "home page" -- set Recent Entries to show only 1 and forward-date an entry so it'll be the first one, have a sticky note, make a dedicated splash page (probably with a template so you can just pop in the links to the tags), etc -- and put in links to the tag pages on that entry so that people can get to different topics.

Here are examples of journals I did this with.

mousebyte I obviously made her journal have a very particular "look", but you can have any template and different looking main pages; you don't have to have the tags visible on the side, etc. (For example, here's a totally different looking one that doesn't have any sidebar or anything:

fearisfortheenemy [feel free to explore how these are set up, I don't really care as long as you aren't weird at me :P "visuals" is not functional yet.] The person who MADE the layout is credited on the left side.)

Instead of linking to a single entry for "info", "permissions" etc like I do on those, you'd want to link to a whole tag page (http://porn_clips.dreamwidth.org/tag/[insert-tag-here]) so that all the entries under that topic show up. Voila, separated by topic.

I took a quick glance at your journal and it looks like you HAVE kind of done this with the sticky note, so you could kind of just rely on that tag sidebar to let people navigate. People looking for what you're posting aren't gonna care if they have to look at the sidebar.

BUT: if you want to have a navigation bar on that main post, I would definitely space the links out a little better, get out of rich text and learn the basics of <a href="whatever">text</a> or even <span style="background-color=#000; color=#fff; padding=#;"><a href="thing">text</a></span>! or get a free template from one of the many resources and put your links in -- but right now that is a HUGE BLOCK OF TEXT and it basically looks like you're trying to oldschool keyword spam, lol

(Do your thing, I don't judge content, but plz make it look like ...links)

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