Might as well make use of all these neat features I payed for ages ago...

[wolfwings]

...and start building a custom LJ style for myself.

It's slowly coming together, though right now the 'layout source' is an absolute disaster. Only the 'friends page' and 'main view' works right now, but the resulting HTML you get back is mighty tidy and clean IMHO. It's even fairly readable, almost impossible to 'screw up' from a badly-formatted meme, and I think it makes good use of layered background images.

It obviously doesn't work worth a damn on IE6, and at this point I'm only running Opera so that's all I've been testing it on. I haven't even given it more than a cursory spin on Mozilla browsers, but it seems to work fine there so far. I am kinda proud of the 'outline text' effect I made, so the dates are fairly readable.

Anyways, if you want to see the progress so far, view my friends page for an example. I don't have seperate 'icons' for locked/private posts, they get a different background color instead. And no, there's no seperation between private/locked posts since only your own journal can have 'private' posts and I didn't feel like making a third color-shifted blur of the background image just for that rare occurance.

Background by Joakim Back from vuni.net which is a cached archive of a much older (and long defunct) website that was called misanthropia.net. I ran across it when looking for the original image from an example picture luxari posted to their page asking for help making it the background for their journal, which led me to tinkering... and now I'm building a whole LJ S2 style around the idea of a fixed top-centered background with vague color-shifting blur effects over top that tries to still be readable.

Comments

[alaskawolf.livejournal.com]

its looking really great :)

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I don't have seperate 'icons' for locked/private posts, they get a different background color instead.

Now why didn't I ever think of that? More than once, I've inadvertently passed a link to someone who couldn't read it, because I didn't notice the icon. I've tweaked my friends-page style to incorporate this -- thanks for the inspiration.

That's the reason I did it too.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Glad someone else understood with me having to explain my reasoning. =^.^= It's also why I didn't make a specific background for 'private' posts, since... well... only YOU can see your own private posts. If you can't remember that it's private, that's your problem, IMHO.

Any other comments on my style so far? I've started polishing the 'primary views' at this point, while I sketch out and plan the various calendar-related views.

Re: That's the reason I did it too.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Well, there seems to be something funky in the userpic handling, at least on comment pages, and in Firefox -- mine's all distorted; it looks like it's being forced to dimensions that don't match its aspect ratio.

Re: That's the reason I did it too.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Whoops, bug on my end. I wasn't correctly adjusting non-100x100 userpictures so they were getting stretched. Verified fixed on Opera 9, and Firefox 2.x at my end, look better now? Still toying with the comment-page layout a bit, may try to 'center' the userpic instead of burying it in the 'convenient' corner of the 100x100 box I allocated, or make the box shrink-to-fit and let the text expand-to-fill. Shying away from the 'shrink to fit' route though since I like having all the IP addresses and what-not in a neat 'column' as I read down comments. :-)

Re: That's the reason I did it too.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Much better! No more funhouse mirror.

Personally, I'm not fond of translucent backgrounds behind text, or squeezing the text into such a narrow column, but I see both all over the place, so other people must like them. I'm fairly old-school when it comes to web design -- witness my friends-page style, which is largely table-based. :)

Re: That's the reason I did it too.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

I've had to move away from table-based layouts simply because they're too bloody fragile. One mis-placed tag from a meme and my entire friends page goes boom. =-.-= This one drops all the way back down to the <body> tag between entries, and between sections as well. The only part that doesn't is comment-trees that are still fairly tightly compartmentalized using <ul> blocks.

And this is much 'fancier' than my final personal layout actually will be, but I'm developing it to properly support the translucent-background effect, not rely on it. :-) It's also meant to support low-resolution screens more effectively, but the layout itself can be adjusted for any screen width just by changing one setting once I'm done. It does prevent one 'uber wide' entry from causing a page-wide scrollbar to appear though, which is why I have it set at the (awfully narrow, I agree) 800-pixel width right now.

Treat this like the 'top of the line model with all the options including individual ashtrays and cigarette lighters for all passenger seats you really don't want' version, if that makes any sense?

Re: That's the reason I did it too.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

And totally random, but I am really happy with the visual markers I made for viewing 'conversational threads' on comment pages with my view, so if you can think of any improvements for the comment page in particular I'd love to hear them. =^.^=