cos | Help me read your posts

I haven't been reading dreamwidth nearly as much as I used to read livejournal, because I find the default reading page really hard to read, and it kind of repels me. Due to the unpleasant experience, I just don't visit as often. But I haven't had time to try to figure out how to fix it, and the few FAQs and settings I found were either confusing or just didn't seem to address the issue.

On LiveJournal, I had a "friends page" setup that worked really well for me, for many years. What I liked about it that I wish I could have here includes:

Clear separation between different entries, in the form of a wide colored divider bar across the page. On LJ that bar was also where the title of the next post would be, but I don't need that specifically; just a clear visual separation between posts.

Userpics did not take up their own vertical space. Instead they appeared on the left sidebar, next to the post. [Edit: This is especially bad on comments; I want userpics not to take up vertical space in the comment section either.]

I could pick a unique combination of foreground and background color for each person. The post itself didn't appear in that combo, but the post was outlined by the background color, and the post title and person's username would appear in the foreground color I chose. This let me easily "recognize" whose post I was looking at by color.

Is there any way to make my reading page on dreamwidth like that? What do I need to do?

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You need to change your theme. There are a bunch that will let you have that setup. I had to go through a big pile of them before I found one that looked enough like how I liked LJ to make me happy, but it has post headers and visual separation on a different colored background.

Which theme is it?
Does it let you choose different colors for each person?

I'll check the theme when I'm on my computer, but it doesn't color people differently. I didn't even realize that was a thing on LJ!

https://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/ is the page style link.

I use Burnished on my journal.

I did find the customize page, but there was no indication of whether any of the themes might possibly do what I want, let alone how to find such a theme... Have you been able to do the things I described using one of those themes?

I haven't spent a lot of time with the style customization tbh. I don't know about horizontal lines, but my theme has each post in its own box (i mean you can look at my page and see it in action). I don't think the individual colors thing was imported as a feature, but I don't know. I wanted one where I could put sidebar things on the right and choose which sidebar elements were there, and in a color scheme that was pleasing to my eyes.

Have you tried clicking on the themes to preview them?

https://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/38065.html has a 101 for new users from LJ land.

Yeah, I've previewed a bunch of themes, but there are *so many* - and there's no way to tell with preview only whether they have the features I want, or whether those features are orthogonal to themes (I think some might be).

I would suggest asking this here.

If you find a theme that does the color-by-person thing well, I would love to know; I did a bunch of poking around years back and was unable to find anything remotely like I had on LJ. (My LJ with this username is an old, old S1 style; I had a fandom LJ that was set up in an S2 style that was similar, which possibly I could try to import, but the style system was too much work at the point when only like three of my friends had moved. Now it's a bit more urgent.)

Okay, I have sorted at least some of this out, poking at the CSS.

my reading page will show what I've done, and I can try to replicate it for another style if you can find a base style that you like and tell me which parts of it you want to color with your custom foreground/background. (The big broad bars are the "background" and the little border around the icon is the "foreground" -- ideally the username would be displayed there too with their name in the foreground color, but moving the username display is fancier than I want to get right now since that's layout, not style, as far as I can tell.)

Edit, also, this is Line Up, with the Chrome color scheme -- if you like what I have except for the color scheme, pick a different Line Up layout/color scheme combo from here:
http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/?layoutid=385312&show=0
and walking you through the changes I made should be fairly simple.

Oh, huh, you seem to have found a way to assign different colors to different people. Is that what I'm seeing? Do you know if you could do that for the horizontal bars the titles are on, in addition to the left sidebar?

Also, one thing I didn't see how to do was get rid of that stuff on the right side altogether. Under layout options they let me push it to the bottom of the page, but it still takes up lots of space.

Yep, those are colors I've assigned, just like my LJ style had. (The big bar is the "background" color and the border of the userpic the "foreground" color in this particular setup, so if you see your post on my reading page, I've picked a light blue-green background for you.) I'm not sure if you can get rid of the right-side stuff -- I don't mind it myself, so I haven't tried.

If you pick a layout and theme I can try to tweak it for the effect you want -- it's adding extra stuff on top of a copy of the theme.

I hacked it together based on this post: http://afuna.dreamwidth.org/60126.html and a bunch of trial-and-error -- the hard part was finding the names for the elements I wanted to color.

Definitely change your theme; most themes provide the requested features. It looks like your journal is totally unstyled!

Help me read your posts

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