Expressive for Scrapbook

[tinyjo]

OK, the Expressive for Scrapbook layer is now in a state where is is useable, I believe. Under the cut is instructions on how to use it. Any and all comments, requests for features, bug reports or, well, anything related to the style, comment here. If LJ wants to nick this for the site, feel free :) You can find the layer code at http://pics.livejournal.com/manage/styles/advanced/layerbrowse?id=66432. S2 people, do you think this would be suitable for general S2 communities as there don't seem to be any Scrapbook specific ones?

1. Go to http://pics.livejournal.com/manage/styles/advanced/ and, in the Create Style text box, enter a name and click Create
2. On the resulting page, ignore the box for Language. In the box for Layout, select [other]. In the text box which should now appear, enter 66432. Click save changes.
3. Now go to http://pics.livejournal.com/manage/styles/. You should see your newly created style. Click on the Edit link
4. On this page, DO NOT touch anything in the style settings bit, even though you'll see the wrong layer name here. It's a bug. As long as you don't save style settings you'll be fine. Instead, click the Customize (or Edit if you already have customizations) button in the Customize section
5. You're now in the customization wizard. Customize to your hearts content, including choosing your theme (much easier for me to do that this way rather than in theme layers).
6. To actually use the thing on your Scrapbook, go to http://pics.livejournal.com/manage/styles/ and click the radio button next to the name of the style you created

Using this method, you should get any updates I make to the layer automatically, which'll be nice :)

Comments

[jinty]

cool - it works, just like that!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Yup :) And I fixed the slight display glitch I noticed in your header :)

wowza!

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm using it now with robots 3-col if you want to go see! So far looking very groovy, only noticed one odd effect -- sorting by date, gallery name, last updated etc. sometimes cuts the displayed galleries down to 8 only, with no links to more. Not sure why. At the moment I'm seeing this on sort by date in IE. Other than that, not spotted any probles -- it's smooth and lovely, great layout and with none of the irritating stretch glitches the basic scrapbook styles suffer from.

Any other quibbles are really livejournal's fault, I think -- it would be great if there was a handy "upload" (or manage?) link on the home page of your galleries -- and it would be great if your pictures were atomatically in the main navigation on your journal page ( instead of "Recent Entries - Archive - Friends - User - Info - Memories" , "Recent Entries - Archive - Friends - User - Info - Memories* - Pictures" ) -- and it'd be great if the navigation strip was there on scrapbook pages, but I wasn't getting any of that from scrapbook anyway ...

P.S. I love my blurb boxes! Any chance you could step me through how to put them on my main blog page?

P.P.S. I want to pimp this on my journal, may I?

Re: wowza!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

I could probably add an overall upload link. In fact, come to think of it I could do a per galley one easily. Watch this space!

It should be fairly easy to add blurb to your main style but I'm at conference tonight. Will check tomorrow though.

Finally, pimp away. I'm happy for anyone to use it & they can comment here for help, features, etc.

Handwriting makes me brief! See you later...

[vierasesine.livejournal.com]

Brilliant!

[ttrtt.livejournal.com]

delete

[scaffold.livejournal.com]

Very cool:)

[modernarchetype.livejournal.com]

That is very cool! Thanks for sharing I am now using it! :)

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

You're welcome :) It's really nice to see all the different themes - I only tried out a few to make sure it worked.

[casey.livejournal.com]

It works great, for the most part-- however, for whatever reason, some galleries refuse to load when I switch over to this style.

It's kind of hard to test it when I only have limited sets of data and it's hard to upload new pics and galleries just to test out my theory, but it seems like the only problem (that I've seen) is with galleries that have no pictures and 4+ subgalleries. When I click on those in my pictures, it tries to load for a long time before finally just rendering a blank white page and stopping. I tried switching back to the previous style and the gallery loaded up immediately with no problem, so I guess it's related to the style somehow?

Overall, though, great job. This is really neat.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Huh! That's really really odd. It seems to be something to do with the Last updated date. I put a bit of conditional code to check if it was there before I printed it and that seems to have fixed the problem, even though one of those galleries does seem to have a last updated date set. It definitely wasn't the number of subgalleries because I have quite a few like that on my own Scrapbook. Anyway, it seems to have fixed it even though I wouldn't have expected it to! Thanks for letting me know.

[kwsapphire.livejournal.com]

When trying to get my links to appear in the links box:

if I have a comma in my link title- [a]link title, with comma[/a] all -of the links are one giant link, all html is visible, and it links to the first link with the comma. Remove commas from all link titles, and no links disply, with or without LI code.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

What you're supposed to enter into the Links box is like this:

link title, link URL, link title, link URL

so it's true that link titles with comma's wouldn't work because it's using that as a separator. I'll have a think and see if I can make that work any way. It should work OK without commas though - can you paste what you've got in the box into a comment and I'll check it out.

PS sorry for the double email - accidentally posted anonymously!

[kwsapphire.livejournal.com]

I'd also like to be able to make my thumnails "scaled" instead of "cropped and fitted to specific size." If at all possible.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

ooh, good point. I never added any of the thumbnail options I had planned. Watch this space - I'll put them into a new version.

[breau.livejournal.com]

I was wondering when someone would get around to that!

This rocks. Kudos for stepping up.

Question - what about doing this for a community's scrapbook? any ideas?

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Communities can't use the Scrapbook feature at all so that's a no-go - sorry.

[breau.livejournal.com]

ps. is there any way you can adapt this so it works once you click on a main gallery? After I click a gallery, it reverts back to my original style.. thoughts?

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

It should work for all your galleries. If you look on the Manage Gallery page for your galleries, do you have (default) selected for their style? Because you can set a specific style for individual galleries which might be overriding it.

[moniqueleigh]

The Scrapbook comm is scrapbook_users.

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Excellent - thanks!

[camomiletea.livejournal.com]

Looks good! Another community that's specifically for sharing S2 layouts for ScrapBook is fblayers.

[camomiletea.livejournal.com]

Will you add the newer themes? Like Ocean Whale, etc. :)

[diziara.livejournal.com]

I just decided to give this a try, and I have one thing that irritates. Well, two but I fixed one with the links list. Otherwise it's awesome, and I love that my picture galleries can now match my journal. :)

The thing I don't know how to fix is the sidebars. I use two sidebars on either side of the content, but for whatever reason, no matter to how I order the boxes, I end up with three items on the left. I want two and two, so I put the one sidebar's items as first and second, and put the stuff for the other sidebar as fourth and fifth, putting none as the third item, and still items 1, 2, and 4 end up on the left, and 5 on the right. Is there any way to get better control on what ends up where in the two column layouts, and even better, the ability to move the powered by sidebar item?

The other thing that bothered me, but I fixed with the links in the sidebar, is there isn't any upward navigation from within the first level galleries, I don't see anything that'll bring me back to the top, so I just added that to the sidebar links list in addition to a listing of all my galleries (will be annoying for people who can't see some of the galleries due to protection, but oh well). Is there any way to get something like that into the style so that it can only show the galleries that a person is authorized to view, and even better, maybe list sub-galleries when viewing a particular gallery?

PS, your journal style looks cool, only one thing, you didn't set a page background color. Given the graphics, it looks like it's intended to be white, but leaving it to browser default makes it light purple for me. Should be a quick fix if you care to make it. :)

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

With the sidebars, that's a problem that I've carried over from Expressive on LJ, I'm afraid - if you leave any of the sidebar selections blank that just gets ignored. I can look at ways to make it more flexible in SB though. The powered by is the same - there's no way of moving it on LJ so I haven't yet added one. I'll have a look and see what I can do.

For navigating back to the top level, the title of your Scrapbook will always work but you should also see that your top level galleries have a tag of diziara which takes you to the top level too.

Thanks for the heads up on the background - I always forget things like that!

[miss1nformation.livejournal.com]

Yay! That was the easiest customization I've done using Styles! Thank you so much!! XD

[ex-yeah975.livejournal.com]

I'm using it now - thanks so much. I really hated all the other gallery layouts and love that it all matches now. I'm too stupid to know how to do all this stuff on my own

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Well, I have to say that they don't exactly make it easy over on SB - lots of gotchas so it's easy to trip up. Glad you liked it :)

[tophee.livejournal.com]

Wow. I just found this Jo, and I have to say I'm REALLY impressed. Great job! *hug*

/toph

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Glad you like it :)

[camomiletea.livejournal.com]

There's a difference in how the links at the top display:

http://community.livejournal.com/teatest
http://pics.livejournal.com/camomiletea/

In the Expressive there are separators (at least in the Weston Blue theme). Apparently the separators are added with CSS (possibly? I didn't check), and the links have different classes: the first link has a class .first and .item, the rest just .item. In your layouts all of the links have .first and .item, not just the first.

Er, do I make sense?

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

You do. That's a bug in my code that's supposed to handle the classes. I'll do a re-write over the next couple of days.

[squishyhat.livejournal.com]

thanks so much!

[mad-jaks.livejournal.com]

YAY it worked first time thanks ever so - the bog standard gallery made my icons look awful - I'll come back and play some more with that tomorrow must away to my pit now

[marilla-pm67.livejournal.com]

I want to thank you ... because now I have a great scrapbook page...

**smoochies***
Thanks

Loading for some and not for others

[clooneyproject.livejournal.com]

Hey love this and am for the most part everything is going great. Only thing is I have had two of my readers (so far) tell me that the gallery is not loading for them correctly. One says that all they are getting is the header and the user pic and lines where the thumbnails are supposed to be and no other pictures are loading for them. The other says that the screen is cutting off on the bottom and left side. Is there anything that I need to do or they can do to get it to load properly for them?

One more thing is there anyway to get the title of the gallery and pic thumbnails to wrap text. The titles on mine are cutting off.

Re: Loading for some and not for others

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

The first one sounds like they're not getting any SB pictures to show at all - is that right? If so, it's probably their firewall causing it.

I've never heard anything like the second one so nothing springs to mind. Might be their monitor size? I know expressive is pretty fixed width.

Not sure about wrapping the titles - I'll look into it for you though.

[imaginecreate.livejournal.com]

Sweet! Thanks!

[stickykeys633.livejournal.com]

I got a little mixed up because for some reason my "advanced customa" link wasn't working, but once I got over that hurdle (REFRESH!) it worked gangbusters! Thanks!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Great - and thanks for the comment! It's good to know people are still finding this :)

[domovoi-13.livejournal.com]

I just stumbled on this. This is great, thanks!!

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! And thank you for stopping to leave a comment - it's great for me to see people are still finding and using this.

love it!

[shimmertarts.livejournal.com]

thanks for sharing!