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As announced a couple of months ago (and I apologize for deleting the post in one of my front page clean-ups), I have indeed gone over my bandwidth again. It should be reset on October 6th. I will not be able to send any missing images to people individually. I will not be purchasing a paid Photobucket account again, so please download your images when they come back up on the 6th so that you do not encounter this problem in the future.

Please do not leave me messages in my personal journal about this or any other issues, as requested in the userinfo both here and there.

ETA This will continue happening from now until the end of time, thus illustrating the importance of saving images to your own image host. The images will always come back on the 6th day of the next month.

At some point today this community hit 10,000* watchers!


While I've never been super obsessed with the number of people who watch this community, once I saw the number creeping up there I thought 10,000 would be a lovely milestone to hit at some point. It's a big, satisfying number and it means just a little bit more that you guys are all here because you're interested in the work posted here rather than because I coerce you into joining the community to see the layouts. :)

Anyway, this is a thank you to everyone who watches this community. I know things have slowed significantly in the past months and you're more likely to get text only entries from me rather than layouts, but I appreciate your support and encouragement nonetheless. Thank you!

*Inevitably when you post about this, at least one person will stop watching the community and I'll end up looking like a jerk with 9998 watchers. It is inevitable!

I mentioned last month that I was going to start archiving everything here to my personal website in order to increase the ease with which you can search for layouts as well as to provide improvements such as live previews for all layouts. I have to work backwards with this by laying all the behind-the-scenes groundwork first before I can re-post each entry to my Wordpress installation, which means I'm starting on the live previews before anything else.

I'm nowhere near close to finished the project, but I thought in the mean time I'd offer a sneak peak at the live previews for the two-column S2 Mixit themes. You can find a master list here (since there are dozens of them) and you can change the theme by clicking on the name of the style sheet. Each theme should persist as you click along through the other page views. Each of the other S2 styles will feature live previews done in the same way, but so far those are incomplete.

[Note that Template #07 is apparently irreparably screwed up. I'll have to look into that.]

Everything is still in a work in progress, so you may encounter some wonkitude.

It comes to my attention that a lot of people don't know how to save images to their computers, upload them to an image host, and then change the links in their style sheets to point towards their new images.

This tutorial is done using Photobucket as an image host example. It is also done using a Mac, but I will note the PC equivalents where possible. Image heavy.

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A) The reason I asked you for your Top Five Favourite Layouts from this community is that I am going to (attempt to) port those layouts over to the Dreamwidth version of this community. It's obviously too much work to replicate everything here for DW, but I thought doing the Top Five would suffice. They may not look identical, but hopefully they'll maintain the spirit of the original designs. The Top Five at the moment are:

1. #15. The Wind Cries Mary — 376 votes
   
2. #38. Escape Is At Hand For The Travellin' Man — 237 votes
   
3. #57. It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City — 193 votes
   
4. #27. Slapping Someone With Silence — 183 votes
   
5. #9. Long Time Running — 170 votes

B) I am altering one of the FAQ questions to reflect my future interest in designing for Dreamwidth. Previously I've said it's fine to build on, adapt, and post my layouts for other people to use at other sites so long as various criteria are met (see FAQ) but I am adding a caveat that Dreamwidth cannot be one of those sites.

I'm not sure how many of you are aware that my blog design history stretches back about seven years or so to my days on Diaryland (yes, Diaryland!), but way back when I used to have a layout site hosted on Geocities that functioned pretty much the same way this one does (i.e. I post, you use). I got the tragic news today that Geocities is closing its doors, so I headed over to see what I could salvage before the site completely shuts down and OH. MY. GOD.

The following designs:

• were made before June 2003


• had their graphics created in Microsoft Picture It because I didn't have Photoshop — the quality of the images below is the ACTUAL QUALITY of what I was posting for people to use


• were often the result of me scanning random crap I stumbled across because I had a scanner and I loved it.


• actually still look decent in Firefox 3 on Mac?!

The twenty two designs below are only a sample of the things I made; the site actually went over it's minuscule bandwidth limit while I was trying to make screenshots. Also, please note that Diaryland worked on a one entry, one page approach.

GHOSTS OF EARLY DESIGN. Which I will now share with you. :D

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Thank you for coming with me in the wayback machine. :)

ETA May 3, 2009: Evidently theme layers are now available for paid accounts only, so the following tutorial will not work for free accounts.

Dreamwidth is a new journaling service that a lot of people have been anticipating for a while. I'm not here to answer questions about the service, but you can find more info at their site as well as in synecdochic's posts on the subject.

---

jennem, being the industrious person she is, quickly figured out how to port Mixit themes to Dreamwidth and we have teamed up to present you with a quick tutorial on how you too can have a more customized layout at Dreamwidth.

WE CAN ONLY TELL YOU HOW TO INSTALL A BASIC LAYOUT; WE CANNOT ASSIST YOU IN MAKING MODIFICATIONS BEYOND WHAT IS IN THIS TUTORIAL.

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ETA: THIS IS NOT A PLACE TO ASK FOR DREAMWIDTH INVITES.

Results are in for our Non-Competitive Layout Challenge!

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Thanks to everyone who participated!

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ETA: See entries here!

Because there was decent interest in a non-competitive layout challenge, I've decided to go ahead with it! ( cut for brief reiteration of why we're doing this )

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If you have any questions, leave them in the comments. Comments are screened by default but anything that needs answering will be unscreened, obviously.

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I did this about a year ago and thought I'd give it another go:

The "Ask This Layout Maker A Question" Meme

Simply leave a question pertaining to my layout making / graphic design habits, inspirations, or techniques and I'll try to answer it the best I can. If you've ever had a question about how I work, now's the time to ask!

Please note that this isn't a "help" post, so I won't be answering questions like "How do I change X, do Y, make my layout look like Z?"

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