I've been working on customizing my journal layout. It's the Transmogrified style, though I've modified the css. (I haven't used any layers yet, just worked through the customize journal style wizard).
EDIT:
I've got the layout nearly up to scratch; the only problem is the userpics. They display bigger than they should be in IE and Safari, and I can fix it in IE by specifying a 100x100 width under *+html .userpic, etc (which in firefox makes the border/background too small to cover the picture, and messes it up in general). But I still can't fix it in Safari, so is there a better way to fix it? I tried adjusting the size with min-width and min-height attributes as suggested, but that didn't seem to help either, unfortunately..
I'd appreciate any help whatsoever ~ thank you!
EDIT:
I've got the layout nearly up to scratch; the only problem is the userpics. They display bigger than they should be in IE and Safari, and I can fix it in IE by specifying a 100x100 width under *+html .userpic, etc (which in firefox makes the border/background too small to cover the picture, and messes it up in general). But I still can't fix it in Safari, so is there a better way to fix it? I tried adjusting the size with min-width and min-height attributes as suggested, but that didn't seem to help either, unfortunately..
I'd appreciate any help whatsoever ~ thank you!
no subject
Date: 2009-07-27 04:14 am (UTC)3. I'm so used to the cascading element of css that when I see text defined that early, I think: ahah, something's overriding that later. my own css is often layered to do just that, with exceptions at the bottom for specific overrides.
4. margin: 0 auto is useful, but it also depends on whether you want things centered. sometimes a layout looks better, oddly, if it's shunted to the left. depends on the layout.
there are actually four ways to list values when it comes to margin/padding:
a. there's the standard shorthand, known as TROUBLE -- TRBL, which is top-right-bottom-left. VERY easy to remember, eh?
b. there's the single one, in which one value is applied to all
c. there's the double, where the first value is top-bottom and the second is left-right,
d. there's the rarely-seen triple, which is (erm, I think, I never use this!) the first is top-bottom and then left value and right value? Check www.tizag.com. They've got all sorts of useful info about this stuff.
5. b href works only if you're on a site where b's been defined -- unfortunately, that site will never be LJ/DW/etc, since we can't define globals. grrrr.
6. sounds like an instance where using margin:0 auto isn't visually the best way to do it, in which case try something like margin: 0 auto, and override it with margin-left: 5%, see what that does. (easier than typing each out separately, for me at least.)
8. there is a way to do subtitles! it just means doing wacky layers, b/c they turned off the global on subtitles -- why? I BLOODY WELL DON'T KNOW. Some of the stylistic choices right now have me bashing my head on the keyboard, b/c they're good only for developers and/or folks who really really know their way around. Hell for anyone else. Regardless, I think it's in this comm, as a matter of fact -- check back a few posts and you should see something about subtitles.
11. borders are my soopersekrit tool when it comes to reverse-engineering someone else's css. doing background colors, one will block out the other, which doesn't help so much -- but borders will overlay, especially if background-color is set to transparent. then you can see what's meshing and what's clashing.
hey, you're not alone in being finicky with layouts. I do the same, but I tend towards minimalism, so doing layouts on LJ/DW/etc drives me crazy for all the div-in-div-in-div crap. I lean hard towards grids, and you just can't manage that with pre-set divs like what's here. Eh, well!
Glad it worked out and is looking like you want!
no subject
Date: 2009-07-28 06:59 am (UTC)especially that acronym (TROUBLE>TRBL), and i think someone recommended tizag.com to me ages and ages ago but i'd forgotten all about it, so thank you for that, too.
i think i'll come back to the subtitle thing after some time. but yeah.. i guess i was trying to avoid working with layers, as i really don't know S2 coding, i pretty much just copy, paste and ask questions there..
also, yeah, you're right about layouts not always working well when centered, my livejournal layout isn't centered but looks way better, i think, on the left. (though the sidebar positioning has some issues.. and let's not speak of the header that refuses to stay in its proper place in IE. hah.) i think journals with header images usually look better centered.. i'm not really sure why i wanted my dw one centered, actually. hm.
what are grids, though? i mean, in the sense you meant. how are they different from div-in-div-in-div styling? (sorry, i really don't know enough about css/coding..)
♥
no subject
Date: 2009-07-28 07:14 am (UTC)~div class="grid_6"~ ...blah blah blah ~/div~
~div class="grid_3"~ ---text here--- ~/div~
~div class="grid_3"~ ---text here--- ~/div~
~div class="grid_6"~ blah blah blah ~/div~
And you'd end up with a series of chunks of info, of which the first is 50% wide (6 being half of 12), then two columns at 25% width each, and there's your 100%, so the next div, being 50% wide, gets pushed down and to the left to start the next 'row'. It takes a bit to get used to, b/c it's not at all like the standard css style, but once you do... it's hard to go back! There's no div-div-div nonsense, except in cases where you want to break a column into sub-columns. The rest of the time, you pile divs into one, instead, like so: ~div class="grid_6 text subleft rounded"~ and so on.
You can find out more info about grids by checking out A List Apart and Smashing Magazine (google them, though I find Smashing to be a friendlier site for its extensive resources, while A List Apart can get talky at times). Also check out these existing frameworks, for info/ideas on getting started playing with them:
http://960.gs/ -- 960 grid system
http://www.blueprintcss.org/ -- the biggest & best known
http://code.google.com/p/emastic/ -- flexible & fluid versions, in 12x and 16x
Several sites that are grids in use and/or demo'd:
http://5thirtyone.com/
http://talkseattle.com/
http://kerrywebster.com/
http://www.subtraction.com/
Those are strongly minimalist themes (since that's my personal pref, so that's what I had bookmarked for ref), but there are plenty on Smashing Mag's site that are anything but minimalist and yet are strongly gridded.
That should be enough to
hurt your brainget you started!