matgb | Hacking my 1337 layers: Dreamwidth Layout work (Reply)

The joys of blogging using a completely new platform with a development team that really want to make it work, instead of just make it sellable is palpable.

Dreamwidth is, still, not a finished, ready-for-general-release product. That's fine, it's getting there. What's really good though, is that the team behind it are really keen on getting the documentation up to speed, and are generally pleased when you go point out something that isn't working right.

After a lot of headscratching, and a bit of trial and error, I've finally got the sidebars to my main layout almost looking right (at least on this browser, on this laptop, with my preferred default settings). Setting the margin for some of the lists to -12px was a daft solution, but until I can figure it out better, it's a working solution.

No point writing something if people can't find it

More importantly, I've developed stuff. Anyone that's read my ramblings online for awhile knows that I take usability and search presence fairly seriously. There's no point in writing something for a general audience if people that are interested can't find what you've written. Dreamwidth's default settings for page TITLE tags were, well, a bit weird, and broke basic usability and SEO rules. So I've been hacking. My early attempts simply didn't work, but a few days ago I simply swapped two lines of code, and now it almost works completely properly (see above bug link though).

So, if you're comfortable with adding stuff to DW layers (probably not going to work on LJ), then this will almost certainly be useful for you. Instead of putting the page title tags out as Username | PageTitle, I've changed it so that on the main recent entries journal page, it displays JournalTitle | Subtitle (ie, for me, Mat Bowles | Whatever I've Picked This Week), but on other pages it displays PageTitle | JournalTitle. When we've figured out what's wrong with the above bug, I'll update it to do even cooler stuff on the Reading page, but...

against a dark background

Now, of more general use, I know a lot of people don't like reading entries against a dark background with light text.

function Entry::print_interaction_links(string target) 
"Prints entry interaction links, aka # comments/leave a comment, with standardized CSS."
{
    var Page p = get_page();
    var int count;
    $count = 0;
        if ($p isa EntryPage) {
        """<ul class="entry-interaction-links">""";
            var EntryPage ep = $p as EntryPage;
        if ($.comments.enabled and $ep.comment_pages.total_subitems > 0) {
            $count ++;
            """<li class="entry-readlink first-item">""";
                $this.comments->print_readlink();
            "</li>\n";
            }
        """<li class="entry-permalink first-item"><a href="$.permalink_url?s2id=6964">Pale</a></li>\n""";
        """<li class="entry-permalink first-item"><a href="$.permalink_url?s2id=1337">Dark</a></li>\n""";
        """<li class="entry-permalink first-item"><a href="$.permalink_url?style=light">Print</a></li>\n""";
        if ($.comments.enabled) {
            $count ++;
            """<li class="entry-replylink""" + ( $count == 1 ? " first-item" : "" ) + """">""";
            $ep->print_reply_link({ "linktext" => $*text_post_comment, "target" => $target });
            "</li>\n";
        }
        "</ul>";
    } else {
            $this.comments->print();
        }
    }

function CommentInfo::print() {
        """<ul class="entry-interaction-links">\n""";
        """<li class="entry-permalink first-item"><a href="$.permalink_url">$*text_permalink</a></li>\n""";
        """<li class="entry-permalink first-item"><a href="$.permalink_url?s2id=6964">Pale</a></li>\n""";
        """<li class="entry-permalink first-item"><a href="$.permalink_url?s2id=1337">Dark</a></li>\n""";
        """<li class="entry-permalink first-item"><a href="$.permalink_url?style=light">Print</a></li>\n""";
        if ($.show_readlink) {
            """<li class="entry-readlink">""";
            $this->print_readlink();
            "</li>\n";
        }
        if ($.show_postlink and $.enabled) {
            """<li class="entry-replylink">""";
            $this->print_postlink();
            "</li>\n";
        }
        "</ul>";
}

I'm the complete opposite for this; if I spend too much time looking at pale background sites, I start to get a headache, hence my preferred layout. So, for you ~~weirdoes~~lucky lucky people, I am going to build a pale background layout as well. This will deliberately not define fonts, background colours, etc, so it will only display your browser defaults (you can change them on any decent browser).

Best bit? I've got this into the base layout code (for my main layout) as a link. At the bottom of this entry on DW, you'll see some extra links, Dark, Pale and Print. Dark gets you back here, Pale takes you to the new layout, and Print takes you to a completely unformatted page. Theoretically, all internal links on the Pale layout will maintain those settings, including if you comment. This is useful.

Lastly, they've added a new feature in, when I post an entry here, the LJ copy will link here, and show hoe many comments are here. But these days I allow comments on the LJ backup, but there's no way of getting from here directly there. Until now. But, the display was, well, FUGLY. Fixed that too, custom CSS box, copy/paste, change the colours to suit.
It's all, naturally, still being tested, but I thought I'd post and let people know that a) I'm still alive and b) I'm trying to be useful.

This layout is, officially, 1337

But more importantly, hover over that 'Dark' link. Look at the S2 ID number. Everytime someone creates a new layout on DW, it gets assigned a new, sequential, number. There are loads and loads and loads of them. But those of us who signed up to the site really early, well we've got styles with low numbers. Mine isn't that low. But it is pretty cool. S2 layout #1337. This layout is, officially, 1337.

I just felt like sharing that.

(feedback on the code, suggested improvements, bug reports, etc very very welcome. Pointing out that the pale layout is barely personalised and needs a lot of work will be a statement of the already known, I'm looking for unknown unknowns out of preference...)