short takes

[cellio]

I thought the model was: air fills with moisture (humidity), it rains, humidity goes down. We seem to be skipping this last step. Someone isn't following the protocol! :-)

Remember when syndicated comic strips had to be drawn 4-6 weeks ahead because of distribution issues and stuff? This week Foxtrot did the blackout. Times have changed.

Dani and I have been watching two sets of DVDs, West Wing and B5. We've been alternating, pairwise. It's a little odd sometimes to flip back and forth between the two -- Bartlet's political intrigues interspersed with Londo's and Sheridan's. We're averaging about one viewing session a week, occasionally two, so this isn't high-speed or anything. By the way, Amazon says West Wing (first season) is coming out for region 1 later this year. I thought that wasn't supposed to happen for several more years.

The crystalized ginger that the Pepperers' Guild (SCA merchant) carries is much tastier than the stuff you can get in the Chinese section of the regular grocery store. This Pennsic I bought enough that they gave me an unopened package of what they order, rather than the weighed-to-order bags like most of the stuff I got. The only identifying information on the package is "Frontier Co-Op". I don't know who they are or where they are, but they do good ginger.

I wish LJ would give me a way of imposing my style settings on the individual-entry pages of journals I read, so I wouldn't be hosed by small fonts when trying to read through an lj-cut or read comments on others' entries. Several of my friends have switched to a style that uses, by default, a font I can't read without twiddling my browser. (The ones I've mentioned it to so far have been very kind about fixing it.) But if I twiddle my browser to make journals using that style readable, everything else I read is too big. (There is life beyond LJ, shocking as that may sound. :-) )

Given that there will always be badly-designed web pages out there, I suppose what I really want is a single-keystroke command in my browser that will bump the font up to the next size for just the page I'm looking at.

Along with the rest of the universe, I've been getting lots of bounce messages for spam I never sent (thank you SoBig). I wonder whether any of the sites that do spam filtering for their customers are running the same filters on their outgoing postmaster mail before sending it. The scary possibility is that they are. What a mess.

Comments

[geekosaur]

Well, there's the &s2style= trick, if I can remember how it works...

The browser I used to use (galeon v1.x on unix) would remember the zoom level for particular URLs. Sadly, they decided that that feature, and a bunch of other nice things, were too complicated for ordinary people to understand, so galeon2 doesn't do that any more. :/

[alienor.livejournal.com]

What OS are you using? I remember playing with a Windows feature when I moved in with Richard that allowed a keyboard shortcut to toggle the font size. It was under the disabilities section if I remember rightly.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Frontier Herb (http://www.frontierherb.com/). Yes, they do end-user sales too.

[geekosaur]

Looks like appending "?s2id=1" uses a default style. I'm not noticing a good way to force use of default pages (I'd've put it on 0, but 0 seems to use the user's default style) but id=4 is a pretty readable serif style and id=5 a nice sans-serif style, both with fonts a little larger than the painful S2 default.

[xthlcm.livejournal.com]

I've been Netflixing the B5 third season recently. I barely made it through the first season (horrible, FFWD-worthy moments of wretched acting and stupid plots), tolerated the second one (where the overall storyline started moving), and am now totally addicted to the third. Heh. And I think the third is supposed to be the slow and boring one.

Oh, and you should try the bulk crystal ginger that the East-End Co-op has. It rules. Very good on top of Dave n' Andy's ice cream.

[cellio]

I'm using Mozilla under Windows 2000. Thanks for the pointer. It would be better if the browser provided a localized solution, though, rather than affecting all open windows on the desktop.

[cellio]

Thanks for the pointer!

Interestingly, I paid less for the one-pound package from the Pepperers' Guild than they charge (retail). I hope the guild made at least some profit from me.

[cellio]

Thanks. Yeah, if I can remember the URL tweak I can solve the problem that way. Maybe I should get a keyboard-macro package so I don't have to remember it. :-)

[cellio]

I started watching B5 sometime during the second season, when a friend said "forget what you thought of the pilot; watch this" and handed me a tape. I back-filled the first season later. While the first season did have some good moments, I do wonder if I would have kept watching if I'd started there.

I thought the third season was pretty good (as I recall; hven't gotten there yet with the DVDs). The fourth is good too. The fifth suffers from the network having jerked JMS around enough on whether there would be a fifth season that he didn't leave enough loose ends going forward.

[alienor.livejournal.com]

You can put it into your style, that way you don't have to remember.

http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_dev/560820.html

[cellio]

That seems to be saying that if I'm using S2, I can modify my comments page as presented to other users. But what I'm trying to do is make sure that everything I read (as a user) is legible, by forcing some uniform style on it. I want to be insulated from my friends' style choices (unless I go directly to their journals, of course). I can't do that now, except manually by modifying each URL. I want a switch that will add that URL modification for me. That way my friends aren't affected but I get a readable style -- everybody wins (except the programmer who has to implement the setting).

Or did I misunderstand the message you pointed me to?

I'm not using S2, mainly because I haven't seen a good, short summary yet of what, why, and how. (Maybe it's out there; I haven't gone looking for it.) I'm satisfied with my style as it is. It may not be exciting, but it's functional -- and I really don't care all that much about glitz in a medium that's really all about text communication. (I also read my email with pine, so I "miss out" on everyone's fancy HTML glitz in their messages, too.)

[alienor.livejournal.com]

I think you misread it :-) The complaint is exactly what you're having difficulty with (other people imposing their taste on you).

What you are trying to do is manipulate the links as they are written on your friends page so that when you jump off of your friends page they are readable to you. If you go to that user's journal page, they'll still need to be manually adjusted.


I'm not sure how to translate the given block of code into S1, though (and it's not worth losing my customizations to play with it, sorry!). It is worth noting that your friends page theme (Generator) is available in S2 and I find customizations easier in S2 than S1.

The what and why of S2 (I believe) is that it's less repetitive on the end user to do customizations (only have to customize one page layout rather than one for each view). Plus a lot of it is automated on the customize journal page (http://www.livejournal.com/customize/).

Do you have a custom style in S1? You could manually add the required code in there, but it's been awhile since I've played with S1 and I forget the details.

[cellio]

Ah, thanks. That makes sense now. Now if I can figure out how to implement it in S1.

I'm using a customized version of Generator for my friends page. This is, in fact, the only page I've customized. The reason I used Generator as a base, even though I don't use it for my journal in general, is that I want to insulate myself from wide entries, like when people post really long URLs or big pictures. In most styles, including the one for my journal, the entire page is widened; with Generator, each entry is in a table cell and only that cell is widened. (Ha! A good use for HTML tables! :-) )

The customizations I made, aside from some fonts and whitespace issues, are to make the differences between public and protected entries more obvious to me. The little lock as the only difference is fine when reading my own journal, but for a friends page it wasn't enough. So I moved the username/picture to the other side of the table cell (left=public, right=filtered) and also moved the lock into the body of the message. This customization was a PITA, but I did finally get it to work through trial and error. Maybe it would be easier in S2; I don't know.

Does S2 even support the idea of using different base styles for different parts of your journal? I like my friends view and my journal view, and they're not the same style.

[alienor.livejournal.com]

Did you do your customizations by creating a new style or by using overrides? I just finished figuring it out using overrides by using one of the communities I manage (check out sca_persona's friends list), but since they are free I don't know how to do it with a new style.

Perhaps you can just stick the overide in anyway? I don't know. Here's the override.

FRIENDS_TALK_READLINK<=
%%messagecount%% thought%%mc-plural-s%% (%%urlread%%?s2id=4) |
<=FRIENDS_TALK_READLINK
FRIENDS_TALK_LINKS<=

<=FRIENDS_TALK_LINKS

You'll have to change the text back to whatever you want.

Does S2 even support the idea of using different base styles for different parts of your journal? I like my friends view and my journal view, and they're not the same style.

I think you can, but it's complicated. The basic assumption is that if you like the style, you like it everywhere.

My solution is to put myself on my friends list. That way if I do something annoying that screws people up, I know about it (and can change it). If everyone did that, perhaps you wouldn't need Generator for your friends view? ::grin::

[alienor.livejournal.com]

crap, that didn't work.

Rather than reformat the whole thing, if you'll send me an email at alienor@livejournal.com I'll email you the code.

[cellio]

I created a style, because (at least at the time) overrides were un- or under-documented. So I copied the style and then edited it, which meant I only needed to know enough to identify the fields I wanted to change and change them.

[alienor.livejournal.com]

I think if you look for %%urlpost%% and %%urlread%% in your style and change them to be %%urlpost%%?s2id=4 and %%urlread%%?s2id=4 it may work.

Let me know if I'm helping any!

[cellio]

Thanks! That does help. For now (since s2id=1 seems to be one of the legible new styles, not the old style like it's supposed to be), I've inserted another link, so I have the option of the user's default style and a (potentially) more legible one. Eventually I'll collapse this down into one link with the id mod. Thanks!

[alienor.livejournal.com]

I looked at your friends page, it seems that you need to change the & to a ? for it to work.

Glad I could help!

And lj_nifty just posted about the same thing. ::grin::

[cellio]

Ah. I see what the problem is, but am not studly enough in the ways of HTML to fix it.

I have the "nc" option turned on for comments, which means that the number of comments is part of the URL. That way, it's easy to tell if there are new comments; the URL has changed, so the link does not show as visited. What this menas is that all of my comment URLs already have the "&" in them, to support this argument, so I have to begin my addition with a "?". (It's not legal to have two ampersands in a URL. This means my URLs break for people who don't use this option, though, like (I presume) you.

The right way to do this involves scanning the URL so far and choosing the appropriate delimiter. But I don't know how to do that. :-(

[alienor.livejournal.com]

That's really odd, because I DO have that option turned on.

I don't know how to fix it either, but if it works for you, then all is well!

[geekosaur]

It looks like the easy way to read someone else's journal entries using your style is to rewrite the URL to look like e.g.
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=lj_syndication&itemid=6275
(instead of http://www.livejournal.com/user/lj_syndication/6275.html). Or use "talkpost.bml" instead of "talkread.bml" if you want to post a comment.

[jducoeur]

IMO, the problem with the fifth season isn't so much that he didn't leave enough loose ends, as which ones he had. Basically, since he wasn't sure whether he was getting more than season 4, he burned through all the really good plots in 4, so season 5 is essentially the leftovers. It's interesting, but far less compelling.

But yes -- season 3 is anything but slow and boring. It's really the season where everything was hitting on all cylinders. Season 4 is a bit rushed -- fun, but almost a rollercoaster ride, it's so brisk. The end of season 4 is really the end of the story; season 5 is essentially the beginning of the next story, with everything left in an intentional disarray. It's almost painfully realistic in the way things are left only semi-resolved at the end...

[cellio]

IMO, the problem with the fifth season isn't so much that he didn't leave enough loose ends, as which ones he had.

True. It's a pity that he didn't introduce a good, compelling new plot to fill more of the space. (I do not consider the Byran plot to be either good or compelling.) The stuff with Lennier was interesting, but there needed to be more like that. Mind, I'll still watch season 5, and buy it when it comes out on DVD, but it's for die-hards.