Preferences in Blog Styles and Layouts

[charmian]

While looking at some of the discussions that people have been having about starting to use Dreamwidth, I notice one of the continual themes is a dissatisfaction with the styles available at DW. It's only natural that DW has fewer styles, but I wonder just what it is that people find so unsatisfactory about the existing ones? What features do people seek in styles?

Personally, I never thought that the existing styles at LJ were that great anyhow, since I use Wordpress and have an even greater range available to me there. (Also, Tumblr's themes) My preference for reading blogs is to have a wide column, and none of this 'big picture at the top' nonsense (my screen is a widescreen, which I don't like... why don't they make non-widescreen laptops anymore? I'd rather have a screen that is tall rather than wide.)

Maybe later it might be a good idea for DW to have a styles contest, with prizes and voting? That might get people talking about what they want to see in styles.

Comments

[matgb]

Heh, don't need to learn anything to copy/paste the aboce, go here to Layout and hit copy/paste.

However, while I don't currently use custom colours, I suspect that's because I never saw the point in 2004, and have never gone back to try them, given I coded custom colours for my comment box using CSS, it might be an idea to get it working better.

It should actually be fairly easy to do what you want, I might write it up as a how-to at some point. OR poke someone to do it.

[zdashamber]

Thanks! I found that last night; I was going step by step through Zvi's Wizard explanation thing even after I posted, and there it was at the bottom. The only obvious-to-me effect of adding the code, alas, was to start the title of an entry behind the userpic of the entry (which is in the upper left corner of the entry in the style I have ["Sherbert" Crossroads by branchandroot]). User-specific color is still just the 2 pixels around the user icon.

AAaaanyway. Looks like if I were to fix it myself I would have to go beyond the door of Advanced Customization, past the sign that says "you will be eaten by leopards if you enter here". I found your "how I swapped user name and entry title in the browser title" thing encouraging for showing a bit of how one could do what one could do. If you do write up some "how to make user colors blatant" thing it could be cool.

[matgb]

foxfirefey is working on something that uses full colours well, I'll let her finish and see what she's done, she knows the style system much better than me (half my stuff has involved me asking her to help make something work). Because I don't use colours, I don't know how to use them, ergo I need to start from scratch. But I'm planning it anyway. As the other reply to this implies I might possibly need to speed up making my layout in a finished enough state it can be used by others.

[baggyeyes]

Dude, you have an awesome layout. I never say awesome unless I mean it.

[matgb]

Thank you. Nowhere near finished yet, I have managed to tidy up the CSS to make it usable by others, just need to strip the colourscheme out from the layout code and make it public.

The floating sidebar boxes were the most work to get right, the rest is just me fiddling. When it's done, it'll get posted to a few places. I've no idea when, it's a lot closer to ready than it was, but I started over a year ago...

[burningbright]

!!! How did you get a tag cloud?? That's the thing I really miss is my tag cloud. It's always been my top priority in choosing a layout (weird maybe, but there it is). I haven't seen tag clouds in any of the pre-made layouts, and I don't really know CSS enough to monkey around with the code.

I guess it's frustrating to me that, in order to get any of the styles looking nice, you have to be able to code them. And while i'm tech-savvy enough that I might be able to do so, it's not a passion of mine, it's not something I want to do, and I have better things to do with my time.

So I guess - more pre-made styles/themes is what I'm wanting. The flexibility option is nice I guess, and over time I'm sure there will be plenty of styles/themes created using that flexibility and made available for those who cannot/will not code, but...

[matgb]

Tag cloud is an option for all styles in teh customise section, the core of my layout is the base DW scheme, the adaptions are actually quite minor, it's mostly tweaking.

Amd I guess the problem is the definition of 'nice', to me, most of the DW styles look nice, so I get confused by what people mean. There're so many options for tweaking, just within existing themes, colours can be chnaged easier (much more easily than on LJ or WP, for example) and similar.

There will, over time, be more premade themes, but over 200 within a year of launch is pretty good, and much more than some sites have (pretty sure Blogger doesn't have that many yet, and it's been around for as long as LJ).

[zvi]

http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options?group=modules

On the tags module dropdown, choose cloud.