Journal Advice

[itsallovernow]

So I changed my layout. Not sure I like it, but then mostly I'm not big on change. My question is, for those more savvy, how do I do some basic tweaking?

I'd like the user pics to have a background or a drop shadow. Right now they're dangling in space. I know my lovely links bar is gone, but is there another way to make links in this style (A Novel Conundrum)? Also, I'm guessing this is a style designed to host a background image because it's very spare. I'd like to do that,or give it a header or something, but I'm mostly clueless as to how any of that works.

Advice? Tutorials? Ways to make the background look textured instead of looking like I spilled Easter egg dye in a smooth blue pool?

ETA: Huge thanks to Eli for pointing me HERE. This is exactly what I was looking for, and I can photoshop the transparency down on them for the Novel Conundrum style in order to have the text be readable, but for now, I'm going with the Component with this gorgeous Chinaberry background!

Yeah!!

Comments

[scrubschick.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. In my format, when I go to customize, there's a tab for 'Background' and under that is a heading for 'Background Image'. It needs a URL to upload from and has the option to repeat the image on down the page. *shrug* I haven't tried it yet.

*hug*

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw the heading for background image, I'm just not sure what that means. I don't like it when the image is stagnant and the screen moves. I wouldn't mind something subtle though, to break up the smoothness. Maybe I'll try the other style I was contemplating instead.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

This isn't the best layout to customize (I played around with it once). I know you can get into the nitty-gritty of S2, but I'm still hanging out in S1 and am not quite sure on that...all I can say is that if you put a background image on, it will probably go behind your text and make it unreadable. I'm also not sure if you can do what you're talking about with the userpics, although there may be some complicated access to that which I don't know about.

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

I tried to play with the other one as well - Variable Flow. It's better, but I like the script presentation on the other one.

I may just go back to my default. It had a nice mix of colors and textures and links. sigh. And here I was, all ready for a change.

I just don't understand the coding well enough to do anything sophisticated. Sigh.

[maudelynn.livejournal.com]

i rather like the streamlined look of it

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I don't like the blankness.

[maudelynn.livejournal.com]

ahh well then, perhaps a nice star filled sky in the background?

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

MMM. That'd be nice.

[maudelynn.livejournal.com]

here is a good place to get some lovely images :D

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Thank you!!!

[elishavah.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that style doesn't enable links, so don't know that I can help there, but you should be able to use tile patterns -- like from here -- to make the background more interesting. (The background on your old style was tiled.)

[thassalia.livejournal.com]

Excellent! Thank you!