Nightfall RP's OOC community

First: Hi! I'm Nightsail, aka Lady Asul, aka That Person Who Does Layout/CSS Stuff Behind The Scenes. Call me 'Sail, or ID me as the mun of the chars I play, whatever works. :) (Once the game starts, that'll be Skarrow and Serph.)

I'm looking forward to meeting our new players and getting Nightfall going again finally, and on DreamWidth this time, to boot!

Second: About getting it going on DW. Uh... well, bit of a story to that. See, I made this nice layout back over on EllJay, and after we decided to come to DW, I whined to my puppy (and to Doc, the head mod) that I didn't want to leave our layout behind. So the solution I came upon was to snag InsaneJournal's copy of the layout I coded this CSS on, and adjust it to work on DreamWidth's system base. It wasn't too difficult. Why didn't I just use LJ's copy? Because LJ did something else with their system code and all their layouts to make it all work with their ads, the flagging system, and a couple other things, and thus DW's LJ-version S2 style system was no longer the same as LJ's own S2 style system. DW's version was closer to what IJ uses... so I snagged it from IJ instead, and all I had to do was tweak a line or three, and then it compiled with no errors, took my CSS, and worked swimmingly.

The downside was, since it was an older copy of the layout than what LJ used, it wasn't only missing "features" like ad placement and their flagging system, but more important features. I've since delved into learning S2 coding, so I can fix those things myself, and I'm not entirely failing so far! I've made the entry titles on Recent Entries views into links to the entries themselves. I've added in the Expand links, for collapsed comments. (They don't show up on the last already-expanded comment, but that's minor, right?) I've also added the Quickreply box back in! (...now to add it in for replying to the entry itself... erk.)

TL;DR: there's still a few more things I need to fix about our layouts, and I apologize for any inconveniences they may cause, but at least they're usable right away, right? :)

Thirdly: I am delving into S2 layout programming, slowly but surely, and tweaking layout bases. This goes way beyond CSS or graphic design in Photoshop (and for those newcomers who don't already know, I am the monkey responsible 100% for our layout's picture files and CSS, so if there's any errors, I am the person to poke about them! Please do poke me! I know the sidebar messes up in some versions of IE, but that error, I can't fix yet, sorry...)

My Super Sekrit Plan^(TM) is to create a layout base with RP in mind. So far, I've done a fair job of emulating the S1-ish comments (you know, the site default ones, like LJ used to have!) and want to have it so a user can switch between comment styles easily enough, in the journal customization options -- the div box models I have in mind for them should make it easy for layout artists to do a whole ton of fun things with them... like, you know, have the comments emulate the text boxes in visual novel types of games, or other RPGs. Or have it look like speech bubbles and stuff, in a comic book layout. Or-- you know, whatever. :) Most of these effects would necessarily depend on the CSS, but if the HTML base isn't correct, it isn't going to look right/be able to be pulled off so well. So I'll probably be spending a while doing up at least one good CSS base for each style. And this will probably take freaking forever, knowing me.

On the bright side, methinks Nightfall will be getting to use this new layout base before the rest of DW. ♥

And, fourthly, but certainly not lastly, I hope we all get to have fun! ♥