Naming the Band

[jducoeur]

Well, choosing a style, actually, but I'm helplessly reminded of the Bobs' classic song right now. Today's little waste of time is selecting a new style to use in LJ, because I would like to move into Style System 2 as a matter of principle. Some thoughts on this particular exercise of style over substance, specifically on the immediately-available options.

Requirement: whatever I choose has to cope gracefully with overly wide images. I'm quite fond of Narbonic, but it's usually about as wide as my preferred browser window. In some styles, that makes all of the text entries run off the edge of the page, which is unacceptable.

Requirement: easy on the eyes. Has to be just glitzy enough to be fun to look at, without interfering with readability. The colors must not suck.

Options:

• Generator: A bit space-inefficient, since it leaves very wide borders around the edges. Works nicely, though, showing all the relevant information clearly. Default colors are kind of blah, but Classic Desktop isn't half-bad.


• Magazine: Fairly boring, but very practical. More efficient than Generator, if a bit less aesthetic.


• Tabular Indent: Moderate on both efficiency and aesthetics.


• The Boxer: Again kind of space-inefficient, but the nicest-looking of the bunch. Default colors are a bit hard to read, but this is the only one that goes to the effort of having its own set of color themes. (Sadly, "Refried Tribute" isn't quite as eye-friendly as my beloved Refried Paper from SS1.)

And the answer is: The Boxer, with a bunch of color customizations. (I'm starting from the default theme, but I don't like light-on-dark lettering so I'm going for a fairly beige tone for now.) That will do for a start, until I'm ready to mess with it further to get exactly what I want. Only one problem immediately apparent: since it doesn't use text for the comment link, I can't get the different colors of visited vs. unvisited when the number of comments changes. That'll bear some tweaking, once I figure out how to get at the guts of the template...

Comments

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

Not bad so far, though it reminds me of coffee.

I'm partial to my S1 leaves, which as you can probably tell was based on the original Refried. It doesn't cope with huge

[cellio]

FYI, your style as of the time of this comment results in my getting a horizontal scroll bar. Yeah, I could widen my browser, but it's at the optimum size now for the array of applications running on my desktop, and I think it's a pretty normal width. I assume the width is dictated by the hard-coded width of the table at the top and bottom; if instead of 800 pixels you set it to 100% of width, that'll fix the problem. (I don't know how hard it is for you to get into the template guts to do that, though if I were using the style I'd also submit this as a bug report against the style. HTML provides proportional values like this and font +/- N for a reason...)

[jducoeur]

Hmm; interesting. Hadn't even thought about that.

After a bit of experimentation, it's pretty clear that it requires a hardcoded integer for the width -- I concur that this is a bug. Unfortunately, this particular style doesn't publish its source, so I can't easily write an override function to fix the problem.

How much of a problem is this for you? It honestly hadn't occurred to me: I read comment with "style=mine", so I *very* rarely see anyone else's style. OTOH, I agree that a percentage would be superior (especially since I actually read at home quite a bit *wider* than 800 pixels).

*Sigh*. I'm going wind up writing a completely custom style, aren't I? Problem is, I'm a dreadful designer, so it's not a trivial project for me, and it would take a while to develop. Tempting to reimplement The Boxer, although that's a bunch of work for a relatively minor payoff...

[cellio]

Oh, it's not a problem for me; I read comments with style=mine too, so this reduces to the relatively-rare case of "I want to read the journal directly to find an entry from N weeks ago". Don't worry about me; I just wanted to point it out.

(I tend to live at 1024x768; I'm not giving the browser 80% of the screen width. :-) )

[jducoeur]

My normal resolution at work is fairly big -- 12 x 10, I think. So 800 pixels is about right. (It also fits the actual width of Narbonic fairly well.)

At home, I tend to browse fullscreen, so I have a full 1200-some pixels to play with. So 800 is actually kind of narrow...