Help me read your posts

[cos]

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?

Comments

[melebeth]

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.

[feuervogel]

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

I use Burnished on my journal.

[wotw]

I would suggest asking this here.

[antimony]

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.)

[someonefromthewater]

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