I think I have to resign as a hacker now

[brigdh]

I'm attempting to design a new style for my journal, and it's driving me crazy. Has the basic code changed? Because it sure didn't used to seem so complicated. The things I'm changing are basic HTML; it really should not be this difficult.

I've been working on it all evening (mainly as an elaborate way of procrastinating from writing the paper that's due on Thursday), because it's taking me ages to figure out each step. I spent half an hour trying to figure out why the %%url%% style on the friends "skip back" was linking to wordsofastory/?skip=25 instead of friends/?skip=25, before finally realizing that the coding was reacting differently in 'edit style' than it would when actually uploaded.

...yes, livejournal, that makes perfect sense! And totally does not make me want to kill anything.

Also, the tables overlap when viewed in 800x600. What the fuck is up with that? I swear that there's a way to code it so the image will shrink when the screen size reduces, but I can't figure out what it is. Or, possibly, I have figured it out, and livejournal is somehow fucking it up, which at the moment, doesn't look terribly unlikely.

Feel free to ignore me. I'm just annoyed, and it's possible that I'm missing something obvious that I'll feel very stupid about once I realize it.

Comments

[b-hallward.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain (more than I ever wanted to).

Though I got to admit, I really loved your old layout. 'Course I'm sort of a sucker for Saiyuki and either the Bible or Shakespeare.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I have so much more sympathy for you and p_zeitgeist now. This must be even harder to figure out if you haven't done it before.

Thank you! It was one of my favorites too, but I like to switch things often. I'll only use a desktop for about a week, for example.

[katsue_fox]

I think something has changed with the LJ coding because the girl who does the layouts for the Kyou Kara Maou comm got into difficulties she doesn't seem able to get round when she tried to do a new layout recently. (The layouts have always worked fine before and she clearly knows what she's doing.) So... it's not just you having problems.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of perversely glad to hear that, because at least it means that I didn't forget everything I used to know, but that LJ has genuinely changed. On the other hand, if LJ has changed, I'm annoyed at them for making things difficult.

[katsue_fox]

If there's a way to make an image shrink when the page size does, I'm not sure what it is and I'd love to know. I wonder if using percentage values for the image size would work? I think there might be a way to do it using javascript, but I have know idea what it is beyond that you need to use a front-end (as opposed to back-end) coding/programming language to detect the user's screen size. That's probably over-complicated and not a lot of use, sorry!! ^^;;

[katsue_fox]

(What I mean by that is that I think that LJ written in Perl, and Perl is a back-end language. Javascript's front-end.)

*Disappears uselessly back up own arse*

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

No, I know what you mean! What I was trying to do was code the percentage value into the table the image's in, so it'll force the image to shrink when the screen size reduces, but leave it alone most of the time. I think if I code the image itself to, say, 90%, it'll look really blown out of porportion, but since you can't see tables, that could expand without problem. Or that was my theory, but it didn't work, so I gave up. Heh.

I don't know Javascript or Perl or any language other than HTML, so I can't do anything with them, but HTML always used to be enough for LJ. I wish it hadn't changed.

*sighs* Thank you, though!

[katsue_fox]

I was wondering if it would work if you set the image size to a certain percentage of the table size, since it's within the table.

I might be wrong, but while tables seem to expand to fit the size of the contents, I'm not sure they can actually shrink the contents.

*Scratches head*

I wonder if it's possible to set max width css properties on images?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Ooo. That's a good idea. I'll have to look up how to do it, though- I can't recall any way to code for that off-hand.

Thanks for the inspiration, though!