LJ meta - scrolling sideways

[cos]

A note for those of you who care whether I read you or not - which I'm sure is not all of you, but probably includes at least some of you: I read LJ mostly on a 12" powerbook. That's 1024x768, and I don't even have my browser full screen wide (I leave some room for the dock, and to see another window poking through on the other side).

About once every week or two, someone on my default reading filter makes a post with...

- A raw URL with long session IDs and ugly CGI parameters, OR
- A scream of frustration in the form of a long string of capital letters with no spaces, OR
- A big image, un-lj-cut, wider than about 800 pixels

... and all of these things cause my friends page to be wider than my browser, forcing me to scroll sideways to read every other entry on the page. So, I remove that person from the reading filter.

Sometimes I comment on their post, but not always. And eventually, I do usually remember to add them back. But in general, that's the best way to get off any of the reading filters I use often: Make me scroll sideways. Even if your browser (and screen) is wide enough for your post, mine often isn't. If you care, put spaces in your exclamations, use <A>nchor tags for links, use LJ-cut for big images.

Comments

[scromp.livejournal.com]

Images are what most often cause that problem for me (non-spaced all-caps yelling? how hard to read! :)

When I run across those, I like to use the firefox 'adblock' plugin -- it works just as well on arbitrary images as it does advertisements, after all. One right click and it's gone. The correct solution, as you have noted, is for people to not do that, but over time I have found adblock to be easier than mass behavior modification.

[epilady.livejournal.com]

The same thing happens to me - I'm on the 12" PowerBook at home, too, and when the page resizes I am *enraged.*

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Tell me more of these Anchor tags?

Re: anchor tags

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

oh. i nearly always do that.

anchor tags

[cos]

Instead of just pasting a raw http://domainname/foo/blip.blop?a=50&b=60&PHP_SESSION_ID=... etc. into your comment, use the HTML anchor tag to name your link, like so: <A HREF="http://whatever/...">your own words</A>
Then, people will just see your own words, and if they really wanna see what the raw link is, they can hold their mouse over it and their browser should show them.

Re: anchor tags

[lachesis.livejournal.com]

heh. I never knew they were called anchor tags.
I've learned how to do them, and other html-LJ stuff all thru friends.

as for the image problem, I never have it, since I have the images turnedd off in my LJ. So, there's a placeholder, and everything's hunky dory.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

With the style I use, a super-ewide entry only makes that one entry too wide -- the rest of my friends page is still the way I like it, and I don't have to scroll sideways.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Yup. Me, too.

I strongly suggest this... it causes much less whinging all around.

[cos]

I'm curious which style that is and what it does differently to fit entries to your screen width, but... a couple of years ago I spent many hours over a few months, customizing my friends page style to do a bunch of things I like, and I don't think I'm gonna be motivated to find the time to redo all of that with a new style. I find most of the new LJ styles hard to read.

[ciaan]

I use a modified generator style, which is an S1 style, and I think each entry on my friends page actually has its own table (or something, I haven't looked at the code in ages), but only the particular entry gets too wide, leaving the rest the normal width.

[awhyzip.livejournal.com]

i really like how the title of any post has the same colorful background as that "sidebar" bit. makes them more defined. what else special have you customized?

friends style

[cos]

I made friends-only posts easier to identify, visually, by making the whole post surrounded in a colored box, instead of just on the top and right. I moved the time and lock out of the box and into the title bar, which leaves more horizontal space for the post body. I added the date, too, so each post has a full datestamp, so I don't have to scroll many posts away to see which date I'm reading. A few other subtle look and feel things maybe, but those are the siginificant ones.

[tragicvioletta.livejournal.com]

I have the same problem here on my 12" PowerBook. But I love the machine! <3

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

I have had good luck with LJ's "hide images" feature. (Not sure of the real name, but it replaces inline images with a link to the image). The only thing that doesn't quite work right is that it sometimes hides really small images if it can't readily determine their size, but most small inline images are emotes that I don't care about anyway.

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

I think you mean the "Use image placeholders on your friends page" for images over a certain size. There are only three options (images placeholders for all images, for images over 320x240, or images over 640x480), but it really does work as advertised most of the time. Interested parties can find it on their Edit Personal Info page, about three quarters of the way down.

image placeholders

[cos]

Contrary to what yehoshua says here, I've tried this feature and found that it mostly doesn't work. I believe the reason is that LJ reads image size information from the HTML IMG tag, and if that info is not there, it assumes the image is "large" and hides it. I really do want to see inline images on my friends page when they're small enough and people only use one at a time - and when reading an individual post, I want all the images to load. If LJ were actually reading the image size from the image itself and knew to hide only images larger than some threshold I set, that would be great. It might take up way too much of LJ's resources to do so, though.

[feuervogel]

12" huh? My laptop's screen is about 10, and the whole thing's smaller (in those 2 dimensions) than a sheet of notebook paper. (It's about 7.5x10x1.)

I love my laptop, but damn it makes reading the internet hard sometimes.

(that is to say, I concur: the lj-cut function exists for a fabulous reason, as do html tags.)

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

it's funny that you comment on this just now. the same thing happened to me today. I didn't diagnose whose post caused it, however.