help please?

Question to you brave people who code your lj yourself.

I like my current layout. But say I wanted to adapt it to S2 for various reasons. How do I go about doing that without destroying my soul?

Please send help. Seriously, people, this can only end in disaster if I try to learn commands myself. I just--just--figured out that a comma was breaking my flist font in friendsview. I have known about this for two years and yet was afraid to touch it!.

Comments

[ladyflowdi.livejournal.com]

I dunno if this will help, but the girl over at premade_ljs has a ton of layouts that she's coded herself. Is this the kind of thing you're looking for?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I'm going to go look and find out.

*Determined*

Thanks!

[boji.livejournal.com]

I compromised. Picked the same design in S2 and kept my banner. Style 2 does allow for a lot of easy tweaking but certain things that I could do away with in S1 coding (the box that says powered by LJ for instance) I can't find a way to get rid of...

My compromise being that it's not a perfect upgrade. Not a perfect LJ but it does more than S1 and I wanted it to...

[abbylee]

Hmm. You can actually easily get rid of it in *most* of the layouts, just not Disjointed. But you can do it with your paid account by editing the advanced layer, if you're not too worried about digging in the guts of it.

[svmadelyn.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD, CLARK AND LEX AND YOU WITH THE TOYS ARE GONE

IT'S LIKE YEARS OF MY FANNISH HISTORY VANISHED IN AN INSTANT

*hyperventilates*

[seperis.livejournal.com]

IT IS BACK STOP IT THAT SCARED ME TOOO!

What I really need is a copy of a base design of S2 for me to work on off lj, but so far, I cant' find one. Or a place where I can work on it in lj without changing my layout completely. Gah.

[svmadelyn.livejournal.com]

http://mfsd.talkoncorners.net/childotp.bmp

Hey, look, Child/Depressed!Komodo Dragon OTP!

*Dawws*

[shusu.livejournal.com]

If you want to play with styles without losing *everything*, make a new style, name it, and just keep changing it till you're ready to implement it. I have one permanent style like that -- I use it for my "naked" links and it comes out like this: http://shusu.livejournal.com/936797.html?s2id=14082990 and my actual layout stays exactly the same -- http://shusu.livejournal.com/936797.html

...and I made a few more styles just to have more to play with.

[shusu.livejournal.com]

http://www.livejournal.com/customize/advanced/styles.bml

Create Style and then edit / mess around with whatever you create that *isn't* bold. That one's in use.

[abbylee]

Right, but that method doesn't work in this case, because she currently has an S1 style.

[abbylee]

Catch me on some chat program?

[abbylee]

Or not.

S2 is really easy if you want to customize everything by the built in options and/or CSS. Your best bet is probably to check out this FAQ [ http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=171&view=full ] which can help you figure out which options are available as an easy to change option. Things like changing the text for certain links are obviously better changed there. Things like changing your headers can always be done with CSS, although it's nice to have the easy option too.

S2 is also great if you're comfortable with programming, or at least with working around a programming language. You can use it to add extra functionality, such as displaying your tags as multi-level tags or as a cloud, or just doing a whole design from scratch.

I'm pretty comfortable with both levels of design (yeah, my journal's obviously not a good example, but I can give real examples if you want) so I can help you figure out how to do what you want. Or if you just want some sample HTML pages, check out http://www.thestylearchive.com/help/sample_files and then use the S2 Bloggish layout.

[akacat]

Find the S2 style that's closest to what you have now, and muck with it. At a glance, Expressive might be a good start. And follow shusu and abbylee's instructions on creating a non-default style, for the mucking-about step.

My LJ is currently 'Expressive', with some modifications primarily to make the tags nested, and reduce the width of the main column. The default wizard allows you to put the side column on either the left or the right, and I'm pretty sure there was an option to display a link list and some other things in that column.

[zellieh]

I have no real help to offer about transferring over - I've pretty much always used S2. But, I have links to communities that teach people about coding S2 styles! (And one day I may even get brave enough to actually create some layers and code some stuff. But not today. *g*)

General S2 links: s2_for_dummies, s2howto, s2styles.
Links for specific S2 styles: s2tranquility2, s2flexisquares.

Reassuringly, I know LJ can remember several different styles for each user, so you should be able to swap back if anything goes horribly wrong.

[isilya]

If you can wait until it is not-April (otherwise known as hell month for me) I'd be happy to update the style to S2. I may even have the original header images somewhere on an HD to make the banner larger -- 800 looks odd on most monitors these days.

It has ALWAYS BUGGED ME that Clark is a real boy while Lex is a doll.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I can totally wait.

*glows*

[psycho-tabby.livejournal.com]

Hello,
I've just been at a convention and had somebody rave about your Smallville fics and so came over to check them out, but your website does not seem to be working. I was wondering if you have your fics stored on LJ or any other sites? The fic I was told about in particlar was called 'Three Impossible Things'.

Sorry to barge in on your LJ, I have tried to look around here to see if I could find them myself with no luck (you seem to have written a great deal *grin*)

Cheers,
Dee.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

http://seperis.illuminatedtext.com/smallvilleindex.html

This one seems to be working okay. Is it still giving you problems? SSA still has my old website up on some links.