Obligatory Dreamwidth Post: Ugliness and Invites

[rsadelle]

norwich36 gave me a Dreamwidth invite code, so I set up an account. I have to admit that a small part of the reason was so that I could have my name (rsadelle, of course, although I can't imagine anyone else would want it). The larger issue, though, is that fic is starting to appear on Dreamwidth and Dreamwidth is hideously ugly. Sadly, persistent style=mine appears to be a paid user feature, and the least horrible of available styles is still pretty bad. (This appears to be a common thing with new fan/community run things - Archive of Our Own is also hideous.) Maybe one of these days, when more and more fic is there, I'll bother to put in the time to make it look better.

Anyway, bitching aside, the real reason for this post is that I apparently have two Dreamwidth invite codes. If you want one, leave a comment or email me. First come first served.

Comments

[smilingslightly.livejournal.com]

Depending on how you find Dreamwidth ugly, you may be able to make it less so without too much effort. There are currently 4 different site schemes, selectable here (http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/settings/?cat=display), and there are supposed to be more to come. (I prefer Celerity). And four different basic styles (http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/?cat=all) that have a lot of color and module options and if you don't like those, you don't have to have a paid account to install your own. See the dreamwidthlayouts (http://dreamwidthlayouts.dreamwidth.org/) community for Dw-ready styles.

I ported over a Mixit-based style and I know others have had success with other LJ-based styles, but I'm a novice in that area so can only point you to getting_started (http://getting-started.dreamwidth.org/) or style-system (http://style-system.dreamwidth.org/) for advice.

Of course, none of that addresses making style=mine the default view, but at least they do have a link to do just atop every entry (presuming you have the navbar activated.)

And all of this is just meant to be helpful, not to contradict your aesthetics!

[rsadelle]

I actually find all of the site schemes and the journal styles ugly. I just spent a little time messing with the colors to make it slightly less unreadable. I'm still not happy with the way none of the styles seem to reflow nicely, and the way they don't use all of the available screen real estate. At this point, I don't spend anywhere enough time there to mess with the custom css to try and fix any of that.