S2 questions

[cellio]

There are a couple customizations I'd like to be able to make to my journal under S2. Does anyone reading this have advice?

I'm using the Generator style because it has (mostly) decent fonts and isn't horribly wasteful of screen space. The first thing I'd like to do -- and I hope this is easy -- is make the font for the "tags" line bigger. I want to leave the rest of the font sizes alone. (Well, I wouldn't overly object to the comment links being bigger, but they're ok as is too.)

The second thing I'd like to do is more complicated. On my customized S1 friends page, I placed the box with the userpic and journal name on the left for public entries and on the right for locked entries. Yes, there's also the little lock icon, but I want more of a visual clue than that. Ideally I'd be able to do that, but I'm open to other ways for making locked posts visually different.

Comments

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

There's actually a community for customization you might want to ask this in. Try s2component or component_help.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. I have a nasty feeling that making the Tags line bigger is non-trivial. Given that the Tags simply appeared in existing styles, including fully customized styles like mine, I believe that they are simply text being appended to the *body* of the entry. So there probably is no simple parameter to tweak in most cases -- instead, the style renderer probably needs to do a text search for the line, and modify it.

I think I would go to the end of the string, scan back to the beginning of that paragraph, see if it was the word "Tags:", and if so wrap it in the requested font. That's not rocket science, but it probably requires a custom style initially. (Once it's built into the style, choosing the font could be parameter-based.)

As for the second request: again, it can certainly be done, and isn't horribly difficult, but it almost certainly requires some S2 hacking. (Which is more or less Perl programming...)

[cellio]

Thanks for the advice. I'm not sure I'm ready to dive into their API to figure out how to write custom styles (or layers, or whatever it is I'd have to modify), so I guess I'll just get used to the existing format. I feel so inadequate. :-)

The "tags" line is smaller than the regular body font. I suspect they're handling it the same as "current mood" and "current music", which are also smaller.

[jducoeur]

I'm not sure I'm ready to dive into their API

Actually, it turns out to be a programming language, more than an API. Very powerful, but definitely a fair investment of time to learn.

The "tags" line is smaller than the regular body font.

Really? Now that *is* interesting, and at least somewhat refutes my hypothesis. Okay, now I'm curious about this...