Expressing myself :)

[tinyjo]

So, cleanskies asked me if I fancied doing a Scrapbook style for her. I said I was up for it (I like a challenge, and SB S2 is challenging for anyone!) and had a look on her current style for inspiration. Which was Expressive, using one of the robot themes. Which made me think "Hey, what about doing Expressive for Scrapbook?" After all, it originates with Vox which has images so it should be fairly easy to adapt right?

It took a bit of starting off (SB doesn't have access to build most of the sidebars for example) but it's coming on nicely now. No picture pages yet but see what you think of the index and gallery pages... http://pics.livejournal.com/tinyjo. Just gotta get that and the cust options sorted really. The point of this post though is to get suggestions, particularly from Jeremy. (a) what would be good sidebars? I've got a links one (although it doesn't come from your LJ links list, sadly, you have to build it yourself) and the profile one (although, again, you have to double enter things like website details in the wizard). I thought I could do page summary but what else? (b) What customization options would you like to see on it? I plan on doing the obvious ones like number of pics per page and so on and trying to do lots of text ones but what else, if anything? And also, general comments.

Comments

whoah!

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

That's about fifteen million times better than what I'm doing with my gallery at the moment (not much, TBH) ...

On the sidebars, the links and profile are a fantastic idea -- it always feels very bleak and isolated over in Scrapbook, that's really starting to make it feel integrated, comfortable, and part of the rest of the journal... Otherwise in the sidebars ... I suppose tags? I don't use tags much on livejournal, but probably more on pictures than elsewhere. I'd rather they weren't the top option, though.

The one other thing I would like in my sidebar (I always want this in my sidebar) is a space where I may put a paypal button and a fragment of text. The "buy me a drink" button. It's nothing fancy -- just a little html form -- but I think my only option in expressive is to shove it into a sticky post ... (I don't like sticky posts)

Re: whoah!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

I just thought the orange robots were funky and then, well, the easiest way to get them was just to nick the style code :)

A button box is easy to add as a sidebar option - I'll just make a random HTML sidebar and you can stick whatever in it. If it would work for a sticky post, it'll work for this.

The tags stuff on SB is not as well developed in the style system, so you can use them, but I think you'd only be able to have a sidebar for them on the front page. I'll fiddle around and then if you don't like the effect you can always de-select it.

Re: whoah!

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

The robots are super-cute, aren't they? ... I love what you've done with them on the page, they look so fantastically bouncy! Re: tags, that sounds like sense, actually.

Random html sidebar? Fantastic!