development corrupts

Paring down

2011-02-26T07:57:09Z

I couldn't sleep last night, so I took Tabula Rasa Plain and pared it down the bare essentials -- used the wizard to remove all the modules, colored the content in shades of gray with some orange highlights, and made unobtrusive any controls and non-content-related links.

It's not written for sharing because it's here to satisfy some very personal quirks*, and so I can't be bothered to test it in other browsers.

* I need gray and no-distractions this week like I need food (but, all my food this week needs to have some red. It just is the way it is!)

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Creating and customizing a theme layer

2009-12-02T08:57:07Z

Edited slightly, and posted to http://dw-styles.dreamwidth.org/13219.html

The basic settings to customize your theme can be accessed and modified via the Customize Journal Style page. However, if you're doing something more complicated, you may need to modify code snippets or manually set some variables. For these, you will need to know how to create a theme layer and attach it to your style.

First of all, a quick rundown of terms:

A style is what is applied to your journal, and it is made up of several layers. A layout layer is the basic structure or framework of the style. Customizations via the Customize Journal Style page will be saved as auto-generated customizations in a user layer. Any other modifications you make, you should do in a theme layer. A theme layer can contain system-provided default color settings; it can also contain any additional advanced customizations you wish to apply to your journal.

Technically, you can just modify a user layer, and it seems easier to do that, because it's already been created for you and you can skip the few steps required to create and attach a new theme layer to your style. However, this is a bad idea, because hand-edited changes to a user layer may be erased the next time you use the wizard. To be safe, always create a separate theme layer if you need to edit something manually.

(!! the links will work from single entry-view; they'll also work from read page, etc, when I post the final entry)

Find your current style information
Create a new theme layer
Copy existing theme layer settings to your new theme layer
Apply the new theme layer to your style
Tips

( on with the tutorial )

For the record, I now hate the advanced customization area and want it to die die die :-) Setting things up is way more complicated than it should be

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Custom reading list colors

2009-12-02T06:56:16Z

ETA: Posted! http://dw-nifty.dreamwidth.org/4374.html (with minor edits, including removing exclamation points *g*)

So many people do not know that Dreamwidth has had custom reading list colors for a long time now!

Putting up a draft entry, shall polish and post to dw_nifty or dw_styles (but I think I may need to do a "here's how to create and start editing your theme layer" first, which I keep putting off)

Enable the custom reading list colors defined by your style

Custom reading list colors are disabled by default, so you'll need to enable it, but it is available for all styles (with the exception of Zesty).

Go to Customize Journal Style, under "Additional Options" select "Use my custom reading list colors"

Most styles implement it as a border around the userpic. However, some styles, such as Negatives, have implemented it as part of the entry border. If you don't like where your style puts the custom colors, you can also customize them by setting some variables in the advanced customization area.

( Read on )

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CSS -> S2 properties conversion easement script

2009-09-21T17:43:43Z

Just wrote a quick script which parses out colors and the elements they apply to from a CSS stylesheet, to make it easier to match them to s2 properties.

Invoke by doing:

> css_to_s2.pl path/to/stylesheet

Can take multiple stylesheets. Actually, if it could parse out the colors from multiple stylesheets, and compare somehow pick out which colors were theme-specific, that would be pretty useful in conversion. (It does nothing of the sort now; it's just slightly easier this way than wading through the rest of the positioning, etc, code)

Mmm, not posting anywhere (else) until I figure out a better way to lay out the data. But I figure I could eventually put up a webpage as an interface in case anyone wants to use it quickly for conversion. Would need to be more careful about the input/output then, but that can wait until later.

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