Category: x-personal

It’s done. Well, done enough anyways. There are still a few little niggling problems but nothing that would impede the usefulness of this layout. It’s a faithful reproduction of the old Dystopia site scheme, based off the Smooth Sailing layout by masterslacker. Both the stable and the experimental/bug-fix versions are fully open and available to the public. You can choose this layout easily by following these links: Stable, bugfix.

If you use this layout and encounter any problems let me know in a reply to this post. Please be sure to include your browser and operating system, along with the address of the page with the problem and a good description of the problem itself.

This was my first attempt at doing anything in S2 and I think it came out rather well. I learned a lot, though I’m not sure if it’ll serve me well as I don’t foresee making any more layouts in the future (Though I’m sure I’ll be tweaking/fixing this one for a long while. I’m definitely the sort to declare a project finished, then spent just as long putting on “finishing touches”). I need to thank uniquewonders for a bit of advice and help, carriep63 for a useful breakdown of the Smooth Sailing stylesheet, s2howto for some useful how-tos, and masterslacker for both writing the original layout and writing some excellent tutorials.

Features:

• Many of the features of Smooth Sailing are still here, including the guestbook entry, the fully customizable sidebar, and the welcome note.
• If the default settings are untouched you should end up with a faithful reproduction of Dystopia in your journal.
• Friends colors show up as the background and font/link color of entry headers on the friends page.
• Customizable icons for up to eight syndicated feeds. (Eight was an arbitrarily chosen number, but seemed to be not overwhelming while still allowing good use of the feature.)
• Default icons for journals, communities, Openid users, and syndicated feeds without their own icons.
• All colors fully customizable.
• Background texture behind the title.

Known problems:

• Friends colors – When using friends there are two instances where the correct color won’t be displayed. 1) If your friend has included a link inside their entry title that link will follow the color you’ve selected for entry title links (or the color your friend chose for the link, but that’s even more of an outside case). 2) If you’ve selected the header as the location for your meta information, the location link will follow the color you’ve selected for entry title links. Both of these are cause by the inaccessibility of the original link (I can’t add style=color: inside the a tag) and the inability of the CSS to access the friends color information.
• Spacing in both the entry and comment headers – Something about the inline list used to create the linkbar doesn’t want to play nicely with any of the other divs that make up the headers. The current table layout gives weird vertical spacing but the proper horizontal spacing which I thought was better than the vice versa arrangement I got with other combinations of divs, spans, lists, and breaks.
• Because the rounded corners aren’t palette images changing the background color or the navigation box background color will result in a square box. I hope to fix this in a future revision.

To-do:

• Clean up the source code a bit more. I think anyone should be able to follow along but a few places might be a bit messy.
• Try to refactor the code more. There’s a few more places where some if/else’s might save me future typing.

For those who still want to use Dystopia – go here [http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/?view=schemes] if you’re using the regular account settings page or here [http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/index2.bml?cat=display&view=schemes] if you’re beta testing the new settings page.

Edit: Since I’m no longer using this layout, click here to preview it on my journal.