Mat Bowles

Making blogs display better on mobile devices

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 22:03:47 GMT

I'm trying to fix some issues with my and Jennie's layout for display on mobile devices, if anyone knows enough about either the DW style system or CSS media types to help, the question is over at style_system
Using media commands to print separate stylesheets?

Essentially, it's considered good practice to have a different stylesheet for different sorts of browsers. For example, on my computer, the browser needs to be told that I want the sidebar to the right, how wide the boxes should be, etc. But on my phone browser, that information is actually worse than useless, as it can't make use of it, I pay for the bandwidth to download it anyway, and some mobile browsers will try and display it if told to even though it can't work properly.

I've had reports from some readers, here and on friends journals, that most DW layouts are unreadable in certain devices (a Palm Pre being a specific example--I can't check). I think this is both a good thing to learn to do, and will be useful overall for the site.

Wondering around cvarious places, wordpress.com hosted blogs do it by not giving any style information to a mobile device, so you just get default browser stuff, which looks ugly, wordpress self-hosted blogs use a variety of tools--some good & some bad, LJ and DW styles don't do anything specific, but seem to degrade gracefully, and Blogger hosted blogs are almost impossible to navigate using Opera Mobile and I still can't figure out what it is in the code they're doing that borks it that badly.

If anyone can spot it, I can code a fix for friends using Blogger. Because that'd make my life much happier.

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[DW] Profile link icons update.

Thu, 07 May 2009 16:28:59 GMT

In my Monday post about icons, I gave replacement codes for the 5 icons that DW commonly uses as well as the 3 that LJ commonly uses. I missed one that DW uses, namely direct links to LJs using the new custom site code.

If you didn't know, rather than the old [lj-user="matgb"] code, DW has replaced it with [user name="matgb"], ie removing the LJ bit given, obviously, it's not on LJ. But cunningly, they've also added another option, if you code [user name="matgb" site="livejournal.com"] it will link to matgb on LJ, not DW. And it'll take the LJ usericon from the LJ server as well.

Which would be cool. Except it doesn't auto-discover whether it's a person, community or feed. So my post Tuesday mentioning the Russian President's blog displayed it as a person, not as a community. Which I think is slightly unintuitive and misleading. So I've fixed that.

I've added another bit of code for DW so that off-site links to LJs instead display the LJ pencil, to show it's something on LJ, not a bloke regardless of what it is on LJ. So, if you look at this post on DW using my style, it'll show the little pencil when I repeat the link. Look: blog_medvedev. I suspect I could keep doing these for ages—if you regularly link to IJ, WP, JF or whatever people, y'know what? Sort your own code out, ask me if you need help.

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[LJ/DW] Making profile icons look cool in your layout

Mon, 04 May 2009 18:13:10 GMT

One of the things I like about journalling platforms based on the LJ codebase is the easy shortcut for usernames that'll link to both the blog itself and the profile, with that nice little logo for the profile link.

ETA: At the top, unfortunately. The site where some of my icons was hosted, dammitja.net appears to be down, I'll be contacting the site owner ASAP, but in the meantime, the code does work, but won't display properly here using the icons I liked :-(

	LJ	DW	Mine
User
Community
Feed
Others

Thing is, the nice little logo doesn't always suit the style of the place it's appearing in, or the colour scheme of the layout. So, given I know how to replace them, I thought I'd update the code and add some new tweaks. As always, CSS hackery, playing with CSS is both fun and easy, I highly recommend it for people of a web-savvy nature.

I have, naturally, chosen a Doctor Who theme to my replacement images—feel free to replace them with something else if you wish. I forget where I got the original code for to do this, it's heavily updated now, but I'd like to credit the author, so if you know, gimme a link?

.ljuser img {
width: 0;
height: 0;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-color:transparent;
/* so that IE users will still see an image */
background-image: url(http://pics.livejournal.com/snapesbabe/pic/000fxssg);
padding: 19px 15px 0 2px !important;
}
.ljuser img[src="http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png"] {
background-color:transparent;
background-image: url(http://dammitja.net/lj/opp/drwho06.gif);
padding: 19px 15px 0 2px !important;
}
.ljuser img[src="http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png"] {
background-color:transparent;
background-image: url(http://pics.livejournal.com/snapesbabe/pic/000fzf79);
padding: 18px 11px 0 2px !important;
}
.ljuser img[src="http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png"] {
background-color:transparent;
background-image: url(http://pics.livejournal.com/snapesbabe/pic/000fxssg);
padding: 18px 15px 0 2px !important;
}
.ljuser img[src="http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png"] {
background-color:transparent;
background-image: url(http://dammitja.net/lj/opp/drwho05.gif);
padding: 18px 15px 0 2px !important;
}
.ljuser img[src="http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png"] {
background-color:transparent;
background-image: url(http://dammitja.net/lj/opp/flibble.gif);
padding: 18px 15px 0 2px !important;
}
.ljuser img[src="http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif"] {
background-color:transparent;
background-image: url(http://www.livejournal.com/img/pencil.gif);
padding: 17px 17px 0 2px !important;
}

Anyway. Dreamwidth users should go to the DW Custom CSS page and paste the code into the big box.

Livejournal users should go to the LJ Custom CSS page and, go on, have a guess...

Yup, copy and paste the code into the box. One little caveat—it's replacing images taken from l-stat.livejournal.com, if LJ changes their CDN again, then the URL might change and the code'll stop working, I'll update it as soon as I know to, it's likely to be a simple change the letter hack (it used to be p-stat.*)

The Colin icon is taken from allah_sulu's Ten Doctor's. If you want to use different images, then replacing the image location is fairly easy, just make sure you also change the dimensions in the 'padding' area, the first two are effectively height and width.

I deliberately haven't done one for OpenID accounts, I might change my mind on that but I think the OpenID logo ought to be got used to. I'm considering a DW staff replacement, but not sure what I should go for (either Five or appeal a bit). Haven't bothered with sponsored Comms, probably ought to, not doing so means the image won't show up at all.

As always, feel free to link or comment with questions, etc.

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