Playing around with my LJ style

[pne]

I've been trying to have a go at making a LiveJournal style that'll look kind of like a Unix-style command-line interface[1]. You can have a look at my latest attempt by specifying the style number.

What do you think? What would you improve?

I know next to nothing about CSS and I pretty much just took one of the LJ basic styles and fiddled around with it. There are probably a bunch more CSS styles I should add and/or change; for example, I think the command-line should have a style of their own to differentiate them from the "output" of the commands called. Not sure what to do.

[1] I'm sure that I'm not the first to come up with this kind of idea. If someone else knows of an existing style number that's similar, I'd appreciate it if you'd point me to the number and/or the journal of someone who has something like this.

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

You could put in a little more info by adding a .profile or a .project to the finger information.

I thought about that, but I can't autogenerate that information, and I didn't want to have to edit my style all the time to change, for example, mail read info. Same with "On since"... I'd have to pick a static date. I might think about the plan, though.

The directory listing is "$ ls -d".

On the Unices I'm familiar with, ls -d foo means "display information about the directory entry 'foo', rather than displaying the contents of directory 'foo'". But here I do want to display the contents of ~pne, and in long format (-l).

Though I considered using -F instead (which puts a slash after directory names) and maybe -1 (one-column output) so I don't have to type in the drwxr-xr-x bits and so people don't wonder over the lack of timestamps (and sizes).

$ xv user_icon.gif [or whatever graphics app is used on UNIX nowadays...] =)
<img src="%%usericon%%">

Yes, I was thinking about that, too. I wanted to have the icon floating, perhaps on the top right (which is fairly empty at the moment), but I don't have enough CSS yet for that, so I parked that idea until later.

It's kinda odd that you're cat'ing next-entry over and over again

Yes, I didn't have a good answer for that. However,

you could make it look like a server log and make one day per file (or one entry per file) with a time- and datestamp naming convention. "20021121_1635.log" for November 21, 2002 4:35pm.

This sounds like a promising idea. Or maybe have one directory for each entry which will contain entry.txt, current-mood.txt, subject.txt and so on.

It's the same deal with the "$ vi comments.txt". vi'ing it is a really cute idea, but you're vi'ing the same file each time...

I agree. Unfortunately, I think I don't have the information about the date available in the section on comments. A pity that the variables aren't global but rather local to one section in LJ customising :(. (I did try putting another section's variable in at one point but got an empty string as replacement. That was %%username%% for the website, which is why that directory now belongs to "webmaster" rather than the username, which is not available at that point.)

I'm not sure I have enough information available to pull off a really good shell emulation.

Oh, and another thing which kind of bugs me is that some commands display output -- such as cat current-mood.txt -- while other commands are hyperlinks and do not display any output -- such as vi comments.txt. Maybe I should change the "add comments" feature to a fake mailto: link?

Re:

[bride.livejournal.com]

for example, mail read info. Same with "On since"...I'd have to pick a static date.

I picked your journal creation date for the "On since" date. The mail info, you can just make up and leave it.

I might think about the plan, though.

The .plan and .project were just text files that got cat'ed into the finger info. Those can just be tacked onto the end.

[shashin.livejournal.com]

Too bad javascript is no longer allowed, you could added lots to the interactivity level and making the display technically correct.

Just some silly suggestions:

Maybe try to mimic the behaviour of nn or perl-lj. That way, instead of cat'ing or less'ing the next entry you can just do something like: (N)ext (P)revious (Q)uit.

I really do like the vi metaphor though, maybe include a :

export EDITOR=vi

then you can insinuate a shell escape.

Can another font be used? Courier is a somewhat difficult font to read. Something san-serif like xterm's font.

Maybe at the end of your HTML also include something like... oh my gosh someone picked up the phonkjasd!@#121
NO CARRIER

Re:

[bride.livejournal.com]

Can another font be used? Courier is a somewhat difficult font to read. Something san-serif like xterm's font.

You could use FixedSys, but there's no guarantee that people will see it correctly.

oh my gosh someone picked up the phonkjasd!@#121
NO CARRIER

Heeheehee, I remember that =P =)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should just change it to "font-family: monospace". If I understand correctly, this should (in theory) use whichever monospace font the user likes (i.e. whichever he told his browser he prefers).

Then if one person has Courier there and another has, say, Lucida Console, then both can be happy.

Re:

[bride.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that would work =)

[shashin.livejournal.com]

Hmm... seems like my browser already does that. My bad.

Just one other thing which is that the templates are based in BML and it seems that it's a templating language in itself. I'm not sure if you can provide yourself some new tags or set template variables for later usage, which would provide yet another way to help you get around the scope problems.