Scratch the Surface

[roadrunnertwice]

Hi, I redid my journal style for the first time in ages! I did not even briefly consider making it any color other than baby-aspirin orange. Also I named the new one "Scratch the Surface," as an homage to my old five meg home base. (Good god, have I really been Extremely Online for 20+ years.)

This time around, I actually dug into Dreamwidth's S2 style system and made my own "theme layer" over Tabula Rasa. I've never done that before! I was vaguely aware of some kind of concept of "~layers,~" but had no idea what was actually involved until a couple days ago.

How about that S2 business, huh? Though TBH it's more like, "how about LiveJournal-descended technologies in general, huh?" Like many of those, this one is very clearly a product of a particular time and place ("people want to build complex document tree-structures and/or roll their own CSS pre-processors by composing Perl subroutine calls!"), and you can't exactly call it "good" per se... but you definitely have to respect the amount of insight and thoroughness that went into it. I can recognize at least five or six of the specific template language grievances that drove the design here — they're ones I've wrestled before without seeing any good way around them, and S2 has at least semi-reasonable answers. But also, WOW. The language design is usable and the docs really aren't that bad, and ultimately I spent like 80% of my time wrestling with CSS anyway, but I kind of feel like I just french kissed a coelacanth.

Anyway, this was a great chance to fix some things that have always bugged me about most of the built-in layouts, especially on mobile. New one should be fairly solid, unless I use a table in a post, in which case I probably deserve what I get in the first place.