dreamscapes | new layout & themes for browser testing

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new layout & themes for browser testing

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Just a quick note that your preview link for the overall layout doesn't work. The redirect trick only works for theme layers (not layout layers). What you can do is pick your favourite theme (maybe the one you'd want us to use as the default theme) and use its theme ID for your overall preview.

Oh, really? I put default colors in the layout and everything! All that work, wasted. Oh well - thanks! I'll edit the post.

Actually, our practice is not to put default colors in the layout layer, just to pick one theme as the default theme layer. It makes it easier for people to do color only theme variations, for one.

The colors in the layout layer are all overridden by the wizard, so they shouldn't have gotten in the way of creating color themes, and since I can preview the layout layer alone by putting it into a style without a theme layer, I assumed it would also be possible to use it that way. Since

wyntarvox mentioned that that isn't the case, I simply removed the block of color settings from it.

I just looked at a couple of themes, but I notice that there are different sorts of licenses attached to the background images. Did you, uh, keep track while you were making the layouts, as to which images had what licenses? For instance, pattern8 only allows for hotlinking, not redistribution... And you can license patterns you've made on colourlovers to us, but if you've picked up patterns from other people, we'll have to double-check their licenses.

Yes, I did keep track of all that. I didn't think I should include all the information in this post, since it is not a submission post. From their terms of use, I understood pattern8 to forbid you from, for example, uploading the pattern file for other people to download, not from using it in a website, since they also say

You may use Pattern8 files for personal and commercial work.
You may use Pattern8 files in your own design work. That includes web design,...

And they don't allow hotlinking:

You may not “hotlink” to any Pattern8 files.

Hmm, I skimmed the license and misunderstood the linking.

But, in any case, redistribution is something we have to keep track of, because when people download Dreamwidth to run their own clone, we include the styles and associated image files by default. Styles/images we don't have permission to redistribute get put in dw-nonfree.

I will make sure to include links and details when the themes are submitted and organize them by image-source at that time. Perhaps fortunately, only a few of the themes use backgrounds from pattern8.

I didn't think I should include all the information in this post, since it is not a submission post.

The wording of the guideline posts is ambiguous indeed but all submitted posts should follow the guidelines outlined in 'What do I need to do when submitting a layout?' and you should have used the 'Required Metadata' template so that we know how we should test this and can check the image licenses. It would be a bit useless to spend time testing a theme we won't be able to make official in the end, wouldn't it? Anyway, I'll drop a comment to Afuna so that the entry can make this clearer. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. :)

I see in the layout layer that some of the font stacks are century gothic, lucida grande, lucida sans unicode. Linux computers sometimes get funky results if the font face is improperly capitalized, and you should put quotes around a font name with a space in it.

Ooh, thanks. I didn't know that.

I'm not very good at making themes or anything, but I thought I'd take a look at each one. Just so you know, when I tried to preview "New Leaf," it said that a problem occurred, and wouldn't let me view it.

Oops, I forgot the is_public setting! Thanks for the headsup.

Ah, there we go.

It's pretty!

Thanks! :)

http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/advanced/layersource?id=33614 is not public.

For all of the diagonal stripe themes, the sidebar is close to impossible to read because the text, the link, and the title colors all correspond to part of the background on which they are overlaid.

Other themes also have this problem: playful plummy (text), toystore (text), saloon, Circus (text), Jim Beam, Professor Brown.

(I only got as far as looking at Professor Brown before I had to stop looking. That's not your styles hurting my eyes, I can only look at pictures so long before I want to spork my eyes out.)

Anyway, I like the idea of the layout a lot, but the module lack of background is difficult to read over pretty often. The text reads the best on the problematic backgrounds when you use a chunky, heavy weight font. Or when the body font colors are not in the background, and the background pattern uses colors of a similar hue and brightness. I don't know that you can make the text legible over some of the rainbow patterns without giving a separate background.

I know the lack of sidebar backgrounds can be hard on some people's eyes and that a lot of the layouts walk the line of readability; I adjusted the text colors darker than the stripes by eye until I got to a place that was readable for me, and of course that must be subjective. I did make a range, with some being much lower-contrast in the background than others (Mon Ami and Smoke on the Water are the palest); even so, my wife wouldn't use any of them - she doesn't like looking at patterns at all. I know from when I posted the first 18 of them in

dreamwidthlayouts that many people have even more tolerance than I do, as some of the most popular themes were a bit harder to read than I would use on my own journal; some people took the code and substituted colors and images for a result that was literally unreadable for me, so obviously mileage varies.

These are gorgeous!

Thank you! :)

Hmmm, all of these are slightly too broad for my browser window. I get a scrollbar at the bottom for all of them. The only way to get rid of the scrollbar is to maximize the window to fill the screen and that's something I hate to do. Is it something about the background images that makes this happen?

Hey, cool layout! I like it. Looking forward to getting it on the site. :)

I'm using this now - Silverquin. So far, it looks fin in Safari 4.03.

I've noticed there are no comment pages, but that's not a problem for me.

I haven't seen them all yet, but I like this theme a lot. When I'm fed up with my current lay-out, I can see myself choosing one of those. Just one thing: is it possible to show the page summary in the side-bar?

I'm viewing in Firefox 3.5.5 for Windows XP at 1440 x 900 resolution, with my browser window maximized.

I checked out Raspberry Swizzle, Silverquin, Clouds, and New Leaf. I share some of the feelings that the sidebar text is a bit difficult to read without some kind of background color. For the record, I really like the semi-transparent background in the modules holding the posts--don't know if you might want to consider a similar implementation for the sidebar modules.

It scales properly -- by which I mean I don't have to scroll horizontally to read the sidebar when I make my browser window smaller -- but the right-hand column seems the one that shrinks the most.

The main issue I have, and it's primarily an aesthetic one, is that the sidebar text looks like it's too far to the right; there's a gap of about 40 pixels between the entry modules and the left-most text of the sidebar. Probably this is just a quick CSS fix (there's got to be some documentation about how to deal with Firefox "gotchas" like this).

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