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torquillGah. It's done, but it ate two days of my life.
I changed the theme for my LJ... I took Component, mucked with the colors and backgrounds, and created the "Theme Park Disaster" theme (that's from the title of the background image, not some clever pun on my part). It's nice... very teal, but still good.
While fussing with Component, however, I became frustrated with exactly how many things I can't adjust. The margins, for one -- they're not in the customization wizard. I tried to look at the source for the layout, and I can't: the author won't release it. Sigh.
It's not like I knew anything about S2 anyway. I started looking at the other layouts, though, wondering whether they'd be easy to tweak even for someone who knows nothing about the pseudo-scripting language that they're built in. I grabbed Nebula, finally, and decided it wouldn't be so bad if I could get rid of the huge gap between the content and the sidebar. So I took a look.
Two days later (last night I went to bed at 0630), I have constructed Nebula Improved. I almost doubled the number of things you can customize on it, including most of the margins, font weights, font sizes, border colors and thicknesses, etc. etc. I still have a little tweaking to do on the default settings for some of the auxiliary pages, but on the whole I'm not only satisfied with how it looks, but I also feel good about the number of adjustments any user can make. I'm especially proud of the tidy little hack that lets you set whether the mood icons and music are on top of the entry or below it.
I have learned about half of what I need to know with S2... there are still a lot of mysteries, and I feel much more comfortable modifying than I do creating from scratch. The compiler declared my code clean a lot of the time, though, which says that I do understand a great deal of what I was doing.
Of course, it wasn't until about dinnertime today that I finally discovered (with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
foogod's help) why the gap in the middle of the page was persisting despite all my attempts to get rid of it. The fix was, predictably, a one-line-edit... and now I can control the separation between sidebar and content with the customization wizard. :)
Nebula Improved isn't all I could wish: it lacks the sleekness of Component, with its rounded edges and tidy title bars. I'm working on it, though... in fact, this entry has taken me three hours to write, because I keep finding things I want to tinker with that aren't accessible yet; it doesn't take long to pull some of these things into the customization area (particularly colors and font sizes), but they start to build up.
I seem to have a lighter hand with design than the original author, and when I'm done it may resemble his layout only in source and in some little details. :) I particularly want to get rid of the little calendar-strip he seems so proud of...
Time to go to bed so that I can spend tomorrow doing some of the things that really need doing, like talking to the IRS and tending to plants. I'll try not to fall in like I did today -- if only because I dislike wandering the house in my bathrobe all day. I should tear myself away tomorrow at least long enough to get dressed.
I changed the theme for my LJ... I took Component, mucked with the colors and backgrounds, and created the "Theme Park Disaster" theme (that's from the title of the background image, not some clever pun on my part). It's nice... very teal, but still good.
While fussing with Component, however, I became frustrated with exactly how many things I can't adjust. The margins, for one -- they're not in the customization wizard. I tried to look at the source for the layout, and I can't: the author won't release it. Sigh.
It's not like I knew anything about S2 anyway. I started looking at the other layouts, though, wondering whether they'd be easy to tweak even for someone who knows nothing about the pseudo-scripting language that they're built in. I grabbed Nebula, finally, and decided it wouldn't be so bad if I could get rid of the huge gap between the content and the sidebar. So I took a look.
Two days later (last night I went to bed at 0630), I have constructed Nebula Improved. I almost doubled the number of things you can customize on it, including most of the margins, font weights, font sizes, border colors and thicknesses, etc. etc. I still have a little tweaking to do on the default settings for some of the auxiliary pages, but on the whole I'm not only satisfied with how it looks, but I also feel good about the number of adjustments any user can make. I'm especially proud of the tidy little hack that lets you set whether the mood icons and music are on top of the entry or below it.
I have learned about half of what I need to know with S2... there are still a lot of mysteries, and I feel much more comfortable modifying than I do creating from scratch. The compiler declared my code clean a lot of the time, though, which says that I do understand a great deal of what I was doing.
Of course, it wasn't until about dinnertime today that I finally discovered (with
foogod's help) why the gap in the middle of the page was persisting despite all my attempts to get rid of it. The fix was, predictably, a one-line-edit... and now I can control the separation between sidebar and content with the customization wizard. :)Nebula Improved isn't all I could wish: it lacks the sleekness of Component, with its rounded edges and tidy title bars. I'm working on it, though... in fact, this entry has taken me three hours to write, because I keep finding things I want to tinker with that aren't accessible yet; it doesn't take long to pull some of these things into the customization area (particularly colors and font sizes), but they start to build up.
I seem to have a lighter hand with design than the original author, and when I'm done it may resemble his layout only in source and in some little details. :) I particularly want to get rid of the little calendar-strip he seems so proud of...
Time to go to bed so that I can spend tomorrow doing some of the things that really need doing, like talking to the IRS and tending to plants. I'll try not to fall in like I did today -- if only because I dislike wandering the house in my bathrobe all day. I should tear myself away tomorrow at least long enough to get dressed.
