Another day, another layout

[jadesfire]

I'm much, much, much happier with this one. My gerbera no longer looks like the wrong colour and the column width makes everything much easier to read. I still don't know if I'll stick with it, but I'm liking it more at the moment.

Plus brown has always been a better colour on me than grey ;)

ETA: In the past 24 hours I have also moved to Firefox 3.5 and downloaded the Chromium skin (so much quicker, so much nicer), changed my Dreamwidth layout twice (I'm sticking with pink until I find a brown one that I like) and Gmail have moved the labels menu. That's possibly enough rearranging of the mental furniture for now. I'm having trouble finding things...

Comments

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

This is an 'Expressive' theme, which are generally prettier and shinier than average. If you go to your profile, then from the 'Journal' drop-down menu choose 'select journal style'. Under "select a new theme", choose "all" and you can see everything that's available to you. Some of them like 'Flexible Squares' let you do as much customising as you want (that's what I used to use). Some, like this one, are a little more rigid. There's lots to play with!

Enjoy :D

[blackmare-9.livejournal.com]

But, see, that's the thing. I have no idea how to customize a journal theme.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I can see how that would be a problem.

Once you've chosen a style of journal that you like, scroll down to the bottom of the page. For most styles, you can choose what you want in the way of columns - for this one, I could have a column on the left, one on the right, one on either side or two on the right. Then look to the right and there's a button that says "customize selected theme"

What you get then are tabs down the left hand side of the screen, and options in the middle. Depending on the style you've chosen, you'll get different tabs. The list below is for mine and I *think* is the most extensive.

The top tab is for the basics of what your journal looks like - mood theme, whether you want userpics to show up or not, that kind of thing. Everything's labelled.

The next tab is 'text'. You know how the reply button on Perspi's journal says "leave a track"? This is the screen she used to type that in. You can have the text saying anything you want.

Then you've got the 'sidebar' tab. Here's where you can choose what you want to show in your sidebar. I like having custom text (my Groucho Marx quote) and my link list. I don't like having my tags because they're such a mess. This is the screen I use to choose those options

I have a 'misc' tab that doesn't have anything on it, then there's a 'links list' tab, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

The one thing I *know* is missing here is a 'colours' tab. For layouts like Bloggish and Flexible Squares, you can set all the colours of everything yourself. Use an hexadecimal code list (google for it, but there's a good one here (http://www.immigration-usa.com/html_colors.html) - they're codes for mixtures of red, green and blue, so there's potentially hundreds of them. If I don't like the exact shade, I tend to tweak the numbers until I do) and just keep playing with colours until you find the ones you like. It tells you which elements you're changing and is one of those things that's easier to do than explain!

There'll also be a 'custom CSS' tab, which is for people using their own style sheets. If you want to insert your own header, you also do that here, and I can give you instructions on that if you want them :)

Does that help?

[mad-jaks.livejournal.com]

Honey, just so you know? This scheme is the one I cut my teeth on with customisations, Expressive is fun to play with.

Provides handy linkity:
http://community.livejournal.com/s2expressive/

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Hee, it's fun if you have a clue what you're doing with CSS! I can normally interpret it once I see it, but actually doing it is a little beyond me.

If I'm feeling brave, I shall have a look, though :D Thanks!