I’ve liked the features and layout of LJ’s new default style, Air, for a while now, but I’ve really hated the colors. Last week I started investigating what I could do to alter it to suit my preferences, and I think I’ve gotten it pretty much the way I like (it matches the colors I have set on my friends feed – I call it Autumn Evening.) Take a look at my journal directly (or use this link if you view all journals in your style) and tell me what you think. After a bit more testing I’ve got a few more ideas for some other themes to work on.
If you’re willing to go a step further a try it yourself, that’d be great. Unfortunately only paid and permanent account holders can do this because it requires access to the Developer Area of Journal Customization.
1) Go to Your Styles and scroll to the bottom of the page to create a new style. Enter a name and click Create.
2) Choose Air from the Layout dropdown list and click Change.
3) In the Theme dropdown list choose Other…, enter “99444848” in the LayerID box that shows up, then click Save Changes.
4) You’ll be back to your list of styles, so scroll until you find your new style in the list. Click on the Use button to switch from your current style to this one you’ve just created.
Current issues:
* The profile buttons at the top of the sidebar are currently blue. I’m exploring avenues on how to change them to match the theme, but nothing’s really working yet.
* In the same vein, the arrows for previous and next are a middle shade of grey. Again, I’m exploring a couple ways to get them to match the rest of the theme.
* By creating a new theme layer to hold all the code for this it seems to have automatically turned on the Use Custom Comments pages option. The property that controls that is disabled in the style so there doesn’t seem to be any direct way to control it. During my testing I did accidentally return to default comment pages a couple of times, but I’m not clear on what I did to trigger that.
* Another consequence of creating a theme layer is that the arrow that indicates whether an LJ cut was expanded or collapsed just up and disappeared. I ended up expanding the circle out into a rounded rectangle and putting the words of the cut back in. For some reason though the words aren’t showing up on mobile devices, just on laptops/desktops.
* This is kind of minor, but if you have a Writer’s Block entry, the tail of the speech balloon containing the questions is stuck at white because I cannot find what bit of CSS creates it.
* The navigation bar for the calendar page currently shows all years in-between your first journal entry and today, even if you don’t have any entries during that year. It even shows all of these to users who shouldn’t see that there are any entries. This is a problem with LJ’s calendar function in general, not specifically this style.