New LJ features

[vilakins]

LJ's brought in a couple of excellent new features that might interest people; see their full post.

Persistent style=mine for Paid Users
There is now an option to "View all journals and communities in your own style" on the viewing options page. It's rather nice as they give you a toggle option to "View in original/my style" option in the nav bar so you can easily switch between. I've set it to view in original style because I like seeing what people have, but I can now easily toggle to my style when I encounter horrible colour choices or unreadable cursive fonts. :-D

Graphic Preview (Snap)
I hated this. I turned it off for my LJ and managed to ad-block it for other people's in FireFox, but now it actually works properly. You don't have to do anything: your setting now applies to everything you view in LJ (not to others viewing your journal) as it should have done from the start.

There's also 20% off paid accounts till the 30th, and you can beta-test the new profile layout, which I've been doing for a while.

Comments

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

Ah, the permanent style=mine is nice. I might have to try that. I've yet to find a layout that I DON'T need to switch to the default to read. I honestly don't know how some of these people read their journals at all, ahaha.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I totally agree; how can they read their flists that way?

I already view comments in my style. But hey, you don't like my nice readable layout? ;-) Clear font, black on white, what's not to like? :-D

I don't get why people have things like red on yellow, or those horrible little cursive fonts, or make their background transparent so the text is on a picture. But yay, now I can toggle when a link to a story takes me to a style like that. Most layouts are OK though and some are very cool, so I like the chance to see them.

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

Yours is fine, that's true. But it's very narrow on my widescreen monitor and that slightly annoys me. Which is irrational, but it fills up the whole scene on style=mine. XD But it's legible! I haven't changed the layout for this comment though I would probably if I was reading a fic.

But yeah. Compared to some of the stuff out there, ahahahaha. If I can't even reply to a COMMENT without switching, that's pretty sad.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I used to have Punquin Elegant which I had set to 90% screen width (like in b7friday and b7fic, but it lacked so many features that I like in this layout. I did do a lot of fiddling though; maybe I can change the width as well. It's not as narrow as some layouts though.

I did have the default comment layout (which you use - "Disable customized comment pages for your journal") for a long while. I like that, and , but OTOH reading comments in my style shows me stuff like people's links. Eh, I keep changing my mind about that one and I might change back to the plain comments.

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

What do you mean it shows you people's links?

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

In Expressive, you get all their links and tags etc down the left side, like on my LJ. But hey, I decided to change back to default comments for a while. There's more room and it is clearer, but I have to admit, my style made it easier to reply to a NaArMaMo comment instead of the whole post by mistake.

And I did try to edit my last comment to be more coherent, but you were too fast replying!

Must get back to my finishathon story. But I just finished 'Left Hand of Darkness' and I find myself wanting to write in Le Guin's cool, clear style. :-P

[vandonovan.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yeah. I see what you mean. I don't use that at all so I wasn't sure. XDXDXD but it makes sense.

good luck writing! :D:D:D

And yay for The Left Hand! :D

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yay indeed! I read that as a teenager and it was so vivid, I remembered some scenes very well. I hauled out the short story collection of Le Guin's I bought on holiday and I'm reading that now. There was a Karhide story, and others exploring (so far) sexual mores in different planetary cultures. :-)

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

Have you read the Earthsea books? Excellent, excellent stuff.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I have, ages ago as a teenager, and only the first three. I have the first one on order to read again, and will work my way through them all.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Ah, is that "The Birthday of the World"? It's an excellent collection.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

It is! I know I've got 'The Compass Rose' somewhere, but I can't find it. The library seems to have all her collections anyway, plus the Earthsea books which I'm going to get back into, but not her earlier novels, dammit. I wanted to reread 'Rokanon's World'.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I've still got a lot of gaps to fill in with my LeGuin reading. It's also high time that I reread "Left Hand", which I read circa 1978. I've read "The Dispossessed", all her Earthsea books, and "The Telling" (highly recommended), as well as a couple of short story collections whose titles I can no longer remember.

I think that "Birthday of the World" is superb. It's what one might call sociological SF. I especially liked the story aboout a society of extreme introverts.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the introvert one yet, but I look forward to it.

I can get 'The Word for World is Forest; and 'The Telling' so I'll work round to them amongst reading other authors as well. :-)

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Her style is marvellous. Somehow she manages to be very concise, without anything that was needful having been left out. The only downside to this is that one finishes her books too soon. :)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

She probably polishes her prose to get it so shiny. :-) I did think LHoD was a lot longer than it was; 'The Dispossessed' is a nice chunky read though. That's the one I rec to people who get all superior and say they don't like SF.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

I love, love, love the fact that they finally let you disable Snap previews everywhere. I hated those f*%ing things. I decide myself whether I want to start loading content from behind a link, thanks.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they should have done that from the start. It didn't bother me after I blocked Snap, but if I had to use someone else's browser, it would annoy the hell out of me. Why would anyone even think it was a good idea?

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. Some people actually liked the bloody things, when I grumbled at them for keeping them enabled on their own journals. They're just... illogical and stupid, and force you to look at links you're not even interested in. In that sense, they're like spammy popups. Liking them just comes across as incredibly non-interet-savvy and inconsiderate to me--you'd think people would want to make their journals user-friendly if they wanted others to read them in the first place. But then again, those LJ layouts with incredibly light gray, tiny text on white backgrounds seem to be crazily popular, and I can't get my head around those either. Those have kept me from friending quite a few people just because I can't read the bloody entries or what I'm typing in the comment box or what icon I'm about to use, so it's pointless. (And I don't like to use style=mine, because it makes it look like I'm reading something I've written, or like someone's hijacked my LJ--I tend to think of styles as so personal that it's like I'm seeing an image of myself speaking someone else's words.)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've had that confusion too with ?style=mine (though I have it turned on for flist comments, the original default), which is why I like the new toggle option: I can flip my style on just for horrible layouts. :-)

I can't figure why some people use layouts that are so hard to read; surely it's hard for them too.

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

Yeah, having that style=mine option in the toolbar is nice. I generally much prefer reading people's LJ's in their own style, but there are times when it becomes really annoying for one reason or another. Up til now I usually just gave up on reading it, in that case, because I could never remember exactly what I needed to do to change it.

How is the new profile layout, by the way?

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I got used to adding ?style=mine to certain LJ layouts.

It's OK. They've rearranged it and put a lot of related stuff together and added some stats and useful links, but there still seems to be a lot of unnecessary blank space. I can't remember what the old one is like now. [goes to look] I think the old one's more succinct, but the new one has some good points. To see it, add ?ver=2008 to your profile's URL. :-)

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

*tries it* Meh. I think the old design is much cleaner. The way the friends and communities lists are arranged on the new version is easier to read, though, especially if you've got long, messy lists like mine.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Agreed on both. Months ago, beta testers complained about the extra white space (due to me suppressing useless stuff like schools maybe?) but it's still there. I figured I might as well get used to it though since they'll bring it in eventually.

[trixieleitz]

I have a bookmarklet for style=mine in my always-overflowing bookmarks bar, and now I can finally get rid of it :)

I quite like viewing different journals in their owner's style, for the sense of being in someone else's space. But some are just unreadable, so Yay! for one-click rectification.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Just what I thought! :-)