#lex talks code wrangling

For some weird reason, immediately after waking up, I decided to see if I could find a better search box for my themes. And find one, I did!

It both allows you to type for whatever you’re searching for, as well as provides a few suggestions with quick links directly to certain tags (or topics, in the case of the ooc blog).

//Okay, I know a lot of people like to post using the small text feature, but I also know that even more people have either vision or eye strain issues that make reading large blocks of small text (like in multiple paragraph rp posts) a pain - sometimes literally. So here’s how you can go about easing it for yourself.

NOTE: This can also be edited for in the event that you actually like and/or prefer small text so that you can post at regular font sizes (because if your blog theme is coded correctly, it shouldn’t mess up anything therein for you), and then you can leave the font size alone for everyone else on the dashboard. It just takes changing out a few numbers in the code to do so.

First of all, you’re going to need something to run and apply custom CSS coding to websites. Now days, this is usually going to be Stylus, which is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera (please don’t use IE or Edge or whatever they’re calling it now; it’s horrible and there’s always major security risks involved).

Step 1: Install Stylus - https://add0n.com/stylus.html - links per browser are directly in the top right hand corner. Easy enough.

Step 2: Go to your tumblr dash - https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard - and click the Stylus icon on your browser toolbar. We’re looking for the “Write style for” bit at the bottom of popup. Click on “tumblr.com” to open the new tab for style editing.

Step 3: Paste in the following code into the code box on the right:

.post-content-text, .post .post_body, .reblog-content { font-size:14px; } .post-content-text small, .post .post_body small, .reblog-content small { font-size:14px; } content small { font-size:14px; } .post-content-text sub, .post .post_body sub, .reblog-content sub, .post-content-text sup, .post .post_body sup, .reblog-content sup { font-size:14px; }

Step 4: Set the “applies to” (located directly under the code box) to “URLs starting with” and put in https://www.tumblr.com/ into the text field (IMPORTANT! Be sure to use the complete url here so that it applies to the dashboard)

Step 5: Name your style and SAVE! You can put pretty much anything here (as seen in the first screenshot, mine is personally set to “FIX TUMBLR’S STUPID SMALL TEXT!!”, but that’s because I was severely frustrated with things at the time of wrangling the code and figuring out what from XKIT was conflicting with it in order to fix that too - in my case it was a setting in Tweaks regarding small text that had got checked by accident overriding the stylesheet from Stylus - so make sure that’s not checked if you’re running XKIT alongside this)

The change should be immediate from there, so long as the style is enabled.

Now, in the event that you want everything in small text...

Follow the same steps as above, but in Step 3, change the font-size:14px; to your preferred font size (the default for small text on the dashboard is 12px, so to have it at default size you’ll want to set it to font-size:12px; -- just be sure the semicolon stays at the end of the markup! That is a vital piece of coding and its absence will break the code!)

And there you have it!

It might seem a silly thing to be excited about to most, but I added a couple new page navigation links to all my blogs that use the same theme:

One tags page down... Three more to go...

 //I’ve got the new layout for the coding set up on one blog... and naturally it’s the one with 17 bloody muses to code for. But!! All of the muses on the DWEU multi now have a verse page entirely of their own, even if I haven’t got much if any blurbs for all of the verses written up yet.

While it does mean more individual pages, the coding itself is easier to update more quickly, so I’m hoping that it will make it easier on myself in the long run. Because while, yeah, I could just switch to Google Docs for everything, I also know that I’d end up frustrated with it because I end up trying to do layouts like what you’d expect for print (the kind of stuff you’d need to do in InDesign) because that’s what most of my graphic design work is.

Besides that, I have far more experience with coding, and dammit, I learned HTML5 to be able to make codes work for mobile devices after having started with HTML4, so I’m bloody well going to use that knowledge. I just hate working with tumblr’s markups to the point that it keeps me from coding themes from scratch even though I’m perfectly capable of doing so.

The biggest thing is just a lack of energy, frequent irl interruptions from family, severe thunderstorms every few days, chronic pain that makes sitting at my desk (and thus my much more powerful desktop pc) difficult, and major brain fog made worse by stress and pain. Which is why it usually boils down to coding versus writing versus making graphics versus pursuing other hobbies and interests like reading, video games, etc.

I’m going to try to get most of the major layout coding done this week across all four rp blogs, as well as doing some other general “spring cleaning” of the pages and such. The hope is to also get Tony’s blog back up and running soon, so there’s that as well, but several pages need to be completely overhauled before I’ll be bringing that blog off hiatus.

That’s a thing you can do now thanks to my new muse directory!

Clicking the images will take you straight to the blog they’re on. Or there’s quick links for each muse’s open starter tag, each blog’s memes, and each muse’s about page.

This is what I did instead of taking it easy now that I’ve got most of the issues fixed with my computer in order to supposedly take a break... >.>

Write up how to edit themes to standardise font size to avoid that whole weird varying sizes that happens when one person uses default sizes and someone else uses small or double small font sizes. 

It’s not difficult, and usually involves just changing one or two lines of pre-existing code, or adding in the code if it’s missing from it all together. 

Though in the process, I learned that tumblr’s changed their redirect link “pages”, which I’m now going to have to see how it affects mobile versus desktop, because I *had* been using the easier-to-remember short links, but now it doesn’t look like that’s an option moving forward (likely thanks to bots and/or viruses, so thanks for that, you assholes).

So now I’ll have to update my coding, and make note somewhere of what the current URL is so I can just find&replace to update them as necessary... Ugh. It’s not the end of the world, obviously, but it’s annoying af when you have the memory issues like I do...