LJ design question

[resonant]

I've been messing around with s2 LJ styles (yes, because I do everything five years after everybody else does it). I've got a nice, boring clean and simple design, with some colors I like, and my page and the comments page look just fine to me, but I'm having some trouble with the friends page.

Does anyone know how to fix that white bar on the left, behind everyone's icon? Can I get rid of it? Change the color of it to #555555?

And, getting even more arcane ... is there any way to make LJ put the date, as well as the time, by every entry on the friends page? to add a little horizontal breathing room between the icon section on the left and the main text section in the middle? To add either a rule or some vertical breathing room between one entry and the next?

Comments

[ladysorka]

The white bar is the individual colours you set for your friends here - you could go in and change all of their colours to #555555, but I don't know of any other way to do it.

But, I'm sure that someone else far more knowledgeable than I will.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Eep! There are 393 of them! Maybe I'd better learn to love it the way it is.

[c-regalis.livejournal.com]

I have NO help to offer for any of your problems. I'm just here to tell you that I really like the way your lj does look now. :)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

That's good! I figured that people who knew something about design would probably scorn it, but I wanted s2 because I wanted to be able to use tags, and I am totally addicted to this background color as the most comfortable color to read against.

I used the Color Scheme Generator (http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html) to get the rest of the colors -- my personal design confidence basically extends to "center everything and make it all the same color plus black and white," so I'd never have come up with the blue and the red on my own.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Can't help with design (I lucked out that there already was a variation of an S2 style that needed almost no tweaking), but this is pretty, clean and readable.

[darkseaglass.livejournal.com]

Very nice layout.

Yours is a bit different from mine, but here's what worked for me.

Go to manage>customize. Then under "Change Individual Settings" choose "Edit Customizations." Once in customize, under presentation there's a setting: "Use friends colours when viewing friends list?" Click to overide default, and set to "no."

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Hm. That's not one of the available customizations in this style, apparently. Or else I'm just looking in the wrong place.

[reddwarfer.livejournal.com]

You can go to Manage: Friends: And then fill out the boxes at the bottom 4 or 5 at time to change the colour and then the ugly white will go away.

[teneagles.livejournal.com]

Have you thought about just using the style "Boxer"? It's nicely customisable, looks very similar to what you currently have, and it has both the horizontal/vertical breathing room and the date format you desire. (Though it doesn't divvy up entries by day, the way you have it.) The icon bg problem will remain -- it's whatever colour you select when you friend someone -- but I found that actually worked well for me, in that I could colour-code certain journals to pop out when I scan down the page. You can see how it looks at My friends page (http://www.livejournal.com/users/teneagles/friends), if you're interested.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

That's pretty -- I like the design very much. And I like having the date with each entry.

It's way too wide for my screen size, though -- is the width customizable?

[teneagles.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is -- you can set the exact width in pixels. It's so wide on my page because I have a *very* large monitor set to a *very* high resolution, so everything's actually centred in the middle 2/3rds of the page when I look at it.

[skuf.livejournal.com]

Instead of absolute values, use percentages - that way there is no horizontal scrollage no matter what the resolution :o)

[isilya]

You can, actually, pick an S2 style, and then create your own custom external style sheet. Such is the wonder of CSS that you can pretty much craft exactly the style you want by figuring out which elements are which.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inzilbeth_/]

A great place to ask might be s2howto or s2layers. A genious who has helped me is [Unknown site tag]. Just ask a question on one of his posts in either community, nit his LJ. Good luck!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inzilbeth_/]

Oops...kunzite1

[axiom_of_stripe]

all of these things that you ask can be done in s2! i can help you some night if you catch me on irc, if you like, or i second the suggestion of asking kunzite1 for help in one of the comms -- zie's pretty good at simple explanations, whereas i tend to get too technical because i think it's fun code. :)