Livejournal style question.

[theweaselking]

EDIT: Question is now almost completely obsolete. sheyrena is awesome and has helped me greatly. You should all send her many monies.

Original question follows!
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So, I've managed to get my old look back after Livejournal totally fucked it up when I gave them money. The colours are all wrong, but I can fix the colours.

What I'm missing is a CRITICAL piece of livejournal functionality. And I have no idea how to redo it.

Take a look at my Friends page (using *my* style, or it won't make any sense).

See how the entries are listed, with usericons and custom colours for some people and what have you? And the timestamp is beside it?

The way I had it before, it did:

TIME
username
usericon
LINK

And LINK was a direct link to the specific post. No comments, didn't open a "reply to" window, didn't require that there BE comments to the post. The rest would be nice, but I REALLY want my direct linky thing back.

Right now, I get a direct link by clicking on the title, IF the post has a title, or by clicking on the "n comments" link, IF there are comments. If there are no comments and there is no title, I can only get a direct link by clicking on Reply To, and that's annoying. I don't want to have to move my mouse and play "find the clicky" if I'm skimming the list and opening a series. I want a direct open-this-post-and-all-comments link, in the same place on every entry.

Anyone know how?

EDIT: Also, fucking comment fucking pages.
I hate how livejournal collapses comment threads. That's why I have a firefox plugin that automatically opens all the comments on a post with collapsed comment threads and displays them all at once.

And, since I paid for my account, it's *not working* any more, because paid LJ accounts have their own thread expandycollapsy code.

How do I make livejournal always open all comment threads completely? I've paid for it and they've "upgraded" me, how do I make it work either the way I want, or the old free way that I had a perfectly acceptable workaround for? Livejournal Add-ons doesn't like some S2 styles. The one I was using is one of them. Swap styles, problem solved.

Comments

[hel]

I have a paid account, and the Livejournal Addons firefox extension does comment expansion with no problems. What extension are you using?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I swapped my style (AGAIN) and now it works.

Looks like there was something wrong with the bog-standard out-of-the-box S2 style I was using that caused it. I'd noticed it failing on some people's journals before, but going ?style=mine always fixed it, and I just hadn't extrapolated.

[moiread]

Does the fact that you changed styles mean you still want help with the time/username/usericon/permalink issue?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I still do. I changed *to* this style - the comment link complaint was about the old style, and changing to this one has solved it, but I didn't know it was solved at the time.

[moiread]

Come to think of it, why didn't you just set the comment pages to display as LJ default instead of in your journal style? I'm sure that would have let the Firefox Addon keep working and also let you keep the old journal style you preferred. It generally makes the comments easier to read, too. YMMV, of course, but I keep my comment pages on LJ default regardless of what journal style I'm using.

(This still wouldn't solve the permalink issue, but I'm fishing for that in the other window.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

#1: Because LJ default is ugly and hard to read.
#2: My options are my style or the journal style. And other people's esthetic decisions are often both hideous and illegible.

[moiread]

If you're currently using S1, AFAIK you are using the LJ default comment page style because having comment pages display in any other style wasn't implemented until S2*. It looks like this. Yes/no?

(* And if they added that feature retroactively to the S1 styles, I will be boggled and amazed not only as to why but as to how on earth I managed to miss that, good lord.)

[moiread]

The point of asking this was to then say that you can do the S2 Magazine style but still keep the default comment pages. If this is what you were looking to achieve, then it takes two steps.

Step One is that you go to the site Viewing Options and you check the ticky box that says "Comment pages: [] View comment pages in your own journal style".

Step Two is that you go to the Customization page for your S2 Magazine layout and under Customize Your Theme → Display → Basic Options there should be a setting that says "Disable customized comment pages for your journal". If you set this to Yes, your comment pages (and, because of Step One, everybody else's) will be the default blue bars seen in both your screencaps and mine instead of in your Magazine layout style.

A permalink can also then be added.

If this is not at all helpful, ignore it. :)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Really, I don't care about the order of items on the friends page or the timestamps being beside rather than above. I want my old one back and I want less wasted space, but that's non-critical. Critical is getting my permalink on.

[moiread]

That can easily be arranged. I've never worked with the S2 style you're using, but they make tutorial communities for this sort of thing, so give me a few minutes and I'll get back to you with links.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm using an *S1* style, because the S2 ones are all abysmally ugly and waste so goddamn much space. Sidebars are nothing but wasted area! Links go on top!

[moiread]

Oh, I see. I that case you have two options. Option #1 is to change your password to something random and e-mail it to me, in which case I will go edit the HTML for your layout in short order to achieve for you a permalink. Option #2 is that you spend awhile figuring out how the custom style page puts LJ layouts together like puzzles made of swiss cheese and try doing it yourself. (The learning curve there really is about where to make the changes and how LJ puts the contents of all those different text boxes together. even a trained monkey could add the permalink after that, since it's just HTML and a couple of code flags. But it may require more hitting things in frustration than you're willing to deal with at the mo'.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

How do I get to the HTML of the layout? I can't get into that.

Also: I could share my current style with you, you could look at it, then I could steal it back, using the style shares.

(Also also: It REALLY should not be complicated to make a style that says "horizontal linkbar across the top. Content fills all width below that. Format each content item as this" - but it seems that NOBODY has done it. This annoys me.)

[moiread]

You create a custom style using Magazine as the basis and then edit that style and add the permalink code into the right place.

The fact that you know how to share styles but don't know how to make them is funny and adorable (in a totally genuine and not-patronizing way, I swear).

I suppose I could just go create a Magazine style and do it myself and then make it public and give you the ID number so you can port it over. That's kind of a hassle because it means I have to set my own layout back to S1 while I'm dicking around, but I'll live. Unless I hear any objections from you in the next few minutes, I'm going to go do that.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The fact that you know how to share styles but don't know how to make them is funny and adorable

The sharing options are RIGHT THERE when you're looking for style-ish bits!

You don't have to fix this for me, really, but thank you!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Argh, I'm running a fucking PAID ACCOUNT. Why is there two fucking inches of advertising garbage and useless links at the bottom of my pages, now?

[moiread]

Um. I don't know. That is very broken and should not be.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I found it - it's that the "viewing style" has those fucking livejournal links at the bottom.

I really, really, really hate this.

[moiread]

Can you screencap it? I'm not sure what you're talking about.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v620/theweaselking/main4/untitled.png

It's the "view" setting. there's only 3 options now, and two of them are covered in LJ-spam. The last is plain text and eliminates the few *useful* options.

[moiread]

This is all such an amusing merry-go-round of you and I using different terms for things.

If I understand you correctly, what's bothering you is that it's giving you a miniature site map at the bottom of every page and that by "'view' setting", you mean the site's Viewing Options?

If so, there are more than three, but they're hidden because they were retired. You can secretly still access them again through this page. I use XColibur, which doesn't have that crap at the bottom. Instead it has only one small blue line of links, like this. Which is not 'nothing' but as far as 'something' goes, it's pretty unobtrusive.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

AHAHAH I was using Dystopia before, and was used to it!

I can go back to that.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

I have a firefox plugin that automatically opens all the comments on a post with collapsed comment threads and displays them all at once.

Do you have a link to that addon?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

yes. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4536)

[botia.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU.

[matgb]

Permalink is entry title. They finally fixed that in a massive beating around the head of "do what people expect from other sites, even fucking blogger is doing that now" stuff.

The rest is fixable hacking your S2 style, I was going to CSS it at first but you appear to be almost there. Hacking S2 is easy once you've got through the learning curve. Which is set at about 89 degrees straight up :-(

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

If the entry has no title, that gives me no permalink! Gah, so stupid!

(Am using S1 style, not S2, because S2 gave me shit and sassed me over wanting NO GODDAMN SIDEBAR)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I need a "my livejournal drives me to drink" icon.

No, seriously, what the FUCK is the idea behind changing the style and view settings one the account when a 5-year-old user gives you money? Fuck!

[matgb]

I have no clue, it makes no sense and didn't happen to me. Tried a Support request? It may actually be a bug they don't know about, or they might be able to switch it back quickly.