another LJ refugee seeking better layouts

[lolmac]

God, I hope this works.

I have been trying to reply to individual comments, and apologise individually, and I have not been able to get a reply to post, so, although I know I should apologise to each of you individually, I am going to have to place this in the post itself.

I'm sorry.  I can say that I'm very tired and stressed, which I am, but the truth is -- I was rude and out of line, and I put my foot in it.  I'm sorry.


Hi there. *waves* I've just been through the available DW layouts, and I hate them all, except for some that I merely don't like. Way too much empty space (eek, it looks like the new LJ comments pages!), colours that bother my eyes, strange all-cappiness, etc. Unfortunately, although I have mad skillz in some areas, I don't know how to do custom styles or css, and I have a bit too much on my plate to attempt to learn it right now.

Instead, I'm going to be terribly shabby and shallow and try to bribe someone to help me.

On LJ, I used the following layouts:

Bluetiful, a Components theme, on lolmac
Desert Fire, a Minimalism theme, on bethinexile
Writer's Block Powder, an Expressive theme, on macgyverdeleted
"rdadailylayout", a customised version of Smooth Sailing, on rda_daily

I will give a year's Paid account DW points to anyone who can do a reasonable replica of these layouts (a year's time for each layout). If you're able to make the layout available to DW generally, I'll be especially happy, because that will hopefully gladden the hearts of more refugees.

Comments

[branchandroot]

Word of advice. It might be easier to get someone who designs on DW to do what you want if you don't start by roundly insulting all the previous work we've done. That's not the kind of approach that makes me, for one, feel terribly obliging, and most of us follow this comm. If you don't like those styles, fine, that's your taste. But putting it in "omg so dreadful, hate them all, compare them to LJ" terms? Really doesn't put me, at least, in a friendly or welcoming mood.

That said, while I'm not about to offer to design a replica after that kind of start, I would be willing to submit a similar layout I've been holding on to for a while. It's loosely designed to match Component. The layout queue (as opposed to the themes queue) is a bit backed up, though. You'll see it as a standard style a lot faster if you signal boost the need for a few more people to patch layouts (instructions on dreamscapes).

[musyc]

Yeeeeeeeeah. *gestures at whole first paragraph* And all I do is themes. I'm not particularly fond of a few I did, but I didn't do them for my taste. I did them for people who need bright colors or who like yellow or who need low contrast, etc etc.

OP: "None of the layouts fit my needs or preferences, could someone help me?" - You'd likely get a half-dozen offers.
"All of the layouts and colors are ugly!" - Not so much with the willingness to help.

[ninetydegrees]

Thank you for speaking up, branchandroot.

[ldybastet]

I think there's some kind of disconnect at work... So the thought that the users here are really *that* involved in the site's design and code and everything to be the actual designers of the themes and layouts is really, really foreign to them, and that they'd run into them here a strange concept. Maybe... *frowns*

But yeah, bribing would work better if the people one wants to bribe aren't first insulted.

[ninetydegrees]

Ignorance isn't an excuse. I don't think insulting *anybody* when asking for help or implying that all DW users have such poor taste because the styles are all "ucking fugly" is the way to go.

[ldybastet]

No, I know. I wasn't trying to imply that. I'm sorry that it came across like that. :( I was just thinking it might be an example of just how different we are here from over there? I apologise for bad wording. :(

Starting off by insulting everything that has been created by you all is definitely not how to do this.

[ninetydegrees]

My bad, ldybastet! We've only had a few posts like this here, and never in this community I believe, but they always make too edgy and it's like I have claws out all of a sudden. My apologies.

Fun fact: yesterday I saw a post on Latest Things saying that all DW layouts were clunky and they missed Generator. It really is to each their own. *g*

[musyc]

Generator? That's *seriously* old school!

[ninetydegrees]

Isn't it? It made me smile. For the record, I think they had settled on a minimal version of Crisped.

[musyc]

And now I'm trying to think of what would be pretty close to Generator. XD Blanket might be a good one, to get the single column effect, or Basic Boxes for that straight/crisp grid look.

[ninetydegrees]

*nods* Negatives or Transmo might work too.

[ldybastet]

It's okay! I understand completely! No need to apologise! You were just being insulted here! LOL

They miss... Generator? *tilts head* Okay! LOL Now, that is a layout I'd call clunky!

[ninetydegrees]

I think what they meant was that most styles are presented with sidebars and lots of modules and they just wanted their entries an a few links at the top, which you can do but maybe they didn't realize that.

[ldybastet]

Ah. That's probably true! *nods* I can sort of understand their thinking. It really does depend so much on how we use the site, doesn't? :)

[lorax]

Generator is still pretty much The Norm over on IJ most of the time, so that might be why they're missing it, too?

[rabies]

I know it's been about a year since you posted this, but I was looking to match my LJ style over here, and what I use there is Component. Could you possibly help me, please?

[branchandroot]

That style has gone live, now, so hopefully it'll be easy! The name of it is Librarian's Dream, and it has a bunch of themes live too. The colors are all user-adjustable, so if it looks close-ish to what you want, I'd recommend choosing one of those and going to the Organize > Customize Layout page to tweak the colors and margins to your preference.

[rabies]

Thank you so much!

[rabies]

One other question, I've gotten this layout to do pretty much everything that I wanted to do, but I can't get my background image to show up. I'm not using any custom CSS, just trying to use the layout's setup to do so.

[branchandroot]

Hmm, yeah that looks like a bug. Your image is in there, but #canvas has a background color that's covering it up. If you want to do this through the wizard, you might try deleting the canvas color (I think that's an option, it's been a while since I looked). Or you could add:

#canvas { background: transparent; }

to the Custom CSS box.

[branchandroot]

Wait, no, wait, it's going to be more complicated than that. *frowns* Let me poke at this. I'm going to have to put a bug in on it, so there won't be an instant fix, but I think I know what needs to happen.

[rabies]

No worries on how fast. Thank you for checking into it for me! I thought I was going crazy.

[chagrined]

You can do not only a reasonable replica of these layouts on DW, but an exact replica of any S2 style. :) See my layout, for example, which is an Expressive layout. I ported the S2 style sheet over from LJ. It takes a little bit of tweaking but is not too bad. I'm trying to remember where I originally found the tutorial for doing that when I did it... Basically, the complications are, there are some variable names that are changed slightly from LJ to DW (so you might have to do a find+replace), and there are some things that don't exist on DW, like content flagging and sponsored content, so if code for that shows up in your layout (for example, content flagging does show up in Expressive) you might have to delete it to get the style to properly compile.

Here, I did a google search and I don't remember which guide I used when I did it (and like I said, that guide wasn't perfect and I had to figure some things out for myself, but it was a good starting point), and here are some resources:
http://starlit.dreamwidth.org/272.html (this one seems to go into a lot of detail!)
http://phoenix.dreamwidth.org/610.html (oh, maybe this is the one I used, which is less detailed)
eta: oh and actually, I see as I'm scrolling down my dwircle, see also the previous entry in this very comm, as well as http://dw-styles.dreamwidth.org/5062.html which was posted in a comment reply there

[syntheid]

There's also dreamwidthlayouts where some alternatives to default layouts are posted.

[zvi]

When you say, "Colours that bother my eyes" can you explain what sorts of colors you are looking for that we don't have? Stylebrowser by color isn't updated, but we have pale blues and muted greens, which is what I took away from your examples.

[foxfirefey]

Hmm, I do have an 80% finished mimic of Component (that's not table based) I've called Building Blocks:

http://foxfirefey.dreamwidth.org/?s2id=225804

[emptyego]

I know this comment is like, a million years old, but... QwQ is there any way you could share your layout? ♥ I would love to use it!

[foxfirefey]

Well, it's not finished as I said, BUT here is the layout source:

https://github.com/foxfirefey/dw-layouts/blob/master/layouts/buildingblocks/layout.s2

And here is the theme source that you see there:

https://github.com/foxfirefey/dw-layouts/blob/master/layouts/buildingblocks/themes/classic.s2

It's actually been so long that it might be fun to convert it to Grid layout CSS and make it mobile friendly in the process!

[emptyego]

Thank you so so so much for replying to me!! :'D And for sharing! I wasn't sure if you would see my comment, or if you were still active on here. Eee! I'm really excited to try this out now! ♥ :D

Back when I used LJ full-time for my blogging needs, Component was my go-to for 90% of my layouts (and when I couldn't afford paid time, Flexible Squares), and I've been feeling super nostalgic coming back to the S2 system on DW. I was sad they didn't have Component, or any sort of option like it by default. I tried making my own duplicate and it didn't turn out so good lol;; (It's been.....a very, very long time since I've played with S2 code.) So I'm super happy you were able to share this with me. Your work is awesome! ♥

[espresso_addict]

Another refugee from LJ -- I too found the default form of most of the styles a bit on the large text/spacy side for my high-res monitors. However, unlike most LJ styles, the ones I've tried are very flexible and extremely easy to customise without having to delve into css. You'd be surprised how different a layout can look if you just spend a few minutes changing the font & font size, & playing around till you find a set of colours that work for you.