Why is no one using CSS to make their magazine’s visual appearances more unique? That was the main draw of old Reddit for me.

(I mean I am, but that is why I asked)

  • wjrii@kbin.social
    67·
    1 year ago

    So you’d need mods who (1) came over, (2) believe in the platform, (3) believe in the instance, (4) want to do custom CSS, (5) know how to do custom CSS, (6) are willing to put for the effort for a readership that’s still fairly small, and (7) feel that the odds of a change that will break their CSS are low.

    That’s a tall stack of filters, and you may not have a lot of company yet on the other side of it. /m/neverwinternights looks really nice, though. Well done!

      • cutitdown@kbin.social
        4·
        1 year ago

        Come on folks, where’s that MySpace/Xanga/Geocities spirit‽ Maybe younger folks here weren’t active online at that time. Sad we’ve lost that a bit online. Lots of people learned lots of stuff to make their pages look cool.

      • May@kbin.social
        4·
        1 year ago

        Codecademy can be good if you are just starting out like the first time trying CSS. Probably would wanna do the lessons on html and then CSS but ya. I took already computer science course in school (only intro course yet bc is summer now) and there can teach more stuff, but before then i already did some lessons on codecademy and it helped to have context for the beginning parts of the class.

        • CMLVI@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, that’s gonna be difficult. Lol I want to do it, but it’s a tall ask to work full-time, take care of my own personal stuff, hobbies, and then also learn basic HTML and CSS just do decorate a landing page for a forum.

          Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to do it. It’s just far down on the priority list and will probably be there for the foreseeable future. Would absolutely welcome anyone to help with it though! Currently best I can do is an icon lol

      • Xeelee@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        I know some CSS. But that just makes me think very hard whether I really want to know more CSS.

    • Lells@kbin.social
      4·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I’m at 7. With kbin still being actively worked on, basically still a prototype, and then just being exhausted from full stack web development all day, my desire to make something cool that may disappear in a month is just really low.

    • Catch42@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      Mine is 5, being influenced by 4, all being bedrock by 7. That is I I don’t know how to do custom CSS(5), and I don’t want to learn (4) right now because it’ll probably break sooner rather than later (7)

    • ProfThadBach@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      I started m/WNC and I have no idea what a CSS is . On top of that I post things to the magazine and they never show up. I have posted like 3 things today and a few over the last few days and the last thing I have that showed up is like 4 days ago. I don’t know what I am doing wrong.

  • wahming@kbin.social
    40·
    1 year ago

    I’m the type to tick the ‘Ignore custom css’ checkbox, so obviously not everybody’s interested in that feature.

          • harmonea@kbin.social
            2·
            1 year ago

            Thank you, I’ve come across one (1) magazine with custom CSS and it didn’t take the font colors in kbin’s dark themes into account.

            (The mod was super cool about it and reverted the change until a better solution could be found, but I knew then I would need this option in the future)

            • cutitdown@kbin.social
              5·
              1 year ago

              It’s possible for mods to make themes that correspond to each specific kbin theme selection. Maybe I nee to write up a post and share how to do it.

              • harmonea@kbin.social
                1·
                1 year ago

                Oh, from my brief poke into magazine settings it didn’t look possible; I’m sure people would really appreciate it!

          • RheingoldRiver@kbin.social
            1·
            1 year ago

            Thanks very much for this. I really appreciate that the option to customize exists for people who want it; equally, I appreciate that the option to NOT have customizations exists for me :)

          • cdiv@kbin.social
            7·
            1 year ago

            Disabling custom CSS everywhere was always a built-in option, as I recall. RES added the ability to disable custom CSS for individual subreddits, which reddit later added as a reddit gold feature.

  • mac@kbin.social
    18·
    1 year ago

    I appreciate you putting in the effort, but it looks kinda scuffed on mobile

    • Jaysyn@kbin.socialOP
      4·
      1 year ago

      Need to figure out how to scale the background to the display, apparently.

      EDIT: I think I fixed that. Now to fix my other magazines.

  • FfaerieOxide@kbin.social
    15·
    1 year ago

    If I may suggest an alternative:

    Rather than, “Why is no one…”

    …instead why don’t you make an easy to follow tutorial and post an article, “THIS is how you can decorate your magazine using CSS…”

    If your goal is to have a more beautiful user experience for all who browse the second would seem more effective at achieving that goal.

    If your goal is to humble brag and position your magazine (and coding skills) as superior to those of other mag mods, the first phrasing is the superior way to go about that.

    I very much doubt your intent was to talk down to anyone, however, so I would very much advocate your writing up a CSS guide in pursuit of what I presume to be your goals (a vibrant and beautiful library of magazines here on kbin).

    Your magazine is very pretty and I commend you for your decorative and coding skills.

    • Jaysyn@kbin.socialOP
      7·
      1 year ago

      I don’t know CSS. I took the automatically generated background CSS (under appearance) & fed it into ChatGTP & told it how I wanted it to look. After a little trial & error to get that right, I tweaked the color codes till I liked them. That’s pretty much it.

      I definitely wasn’t trying to talk down to anyone.

      • Balssh@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        Still, could do a small informative post about how to go about modifying CSS of a magazine. This place is still relatively small and I bet many people don’t even know there can be custom CSS (like myself lol).

  • EnglishMobster@kbin.social
    9·
    1 year ago

    I’m just waiting for things to shake out before I start going crazy with CSS.

    This website’s CSS is more complex than Old Reddit’s, and people can easily apply different themes. Without a checkbox to turn CSS off, I can easily break my magazines for others.

  • May@kbin.social
    9·
    1 year ago

    Bc not all of them know how. some people just started magazines bc they were told “is there no magazine for that thing u like? Just make it yourself!” which doesnt necessarily mean they know how to moderate a community or even do custom CSS.

      • CMLVI@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Some mods are literally just there to moderate. Others were there for CSS stuff and bot functionality. I imagine more of the latter will come over when it becomes unwieldy to do those things on the platform, and hopefully kbin will be more accepting to that functionality in the future.

  • Voyajer@kbin.social
    8·
    1 year ago

    I didn’t realize you could decorate magazines until this post. Do Lemmy users see any custom CSS too?

    • joobeejoo47@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Can you share your code for that? It looks really good! If you’re okay with it, I’d like to copy it and tweak a bit for my own magazine.

      • atocci@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        Edit: Added a comment and updated the option bar to match the navbar.
        Sure, here you go! I’ve never done anything like this before so it’s probably a formatting disaster, but I’ve done my best to clean it a bit and add some comments about what does what here. This is what I’ve come up with after a few hours of just poking around with the inspect element feature and reading some tutorials:

        /* Navbar */
        #header {
        background: linear-gradient(to top right, rgba(229, 0, 32, .8) , rgba(242, 151, 57, .8));
        box-shadow: 0px 4px 10px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
        backdrop-filter: blur(10px);
        position: relative; z-index: 4001
        }

        /* Page background image */
        #middle {
        background: url(https://toaru-project.com/railgun_t/core_sys/images/main/common/logo_t.svg) no-repeat center center fixed;
        background-size: contain;
        }

        /* Post box transparency */
        .section {
        opacity: 0.96;
        }

        /* kbin footer background */
        #footer {
        background: linear-gradient(to top right, rgba(229, 0, 32, 1) , rgba(242, 151, 57, 1));
        }

        /* The little arrow button in the bottom right that takes you back to the top of the page */
        #scroll-top {
        background: linear-gradient(to top right, rgba(229, 0, 32, .8) , rgba(242, 151, 57, .8));
        box-shadow: 0px 4px 10px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
        backdrop-filter: blur(10px);
        }

        /* Options bar */
        #options {
        background: linear-gradient(to top right, rgba(229, 0, 32, .8) , rgba(242, 151, 57, .8));
        box-shadow: 0px 4px 10px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.25);
        backdrop-filter: blur(10px);
        position: relative
        }

        /* upvote color */
        .vote .active.vote__up button {
        color: rgba(242, 151, 57);
        }

        /* Media viewer background blur */
        .goverlay {
        background: rgba(0,0,0,.5);
        backdrop-filter: blur(15px);
        }

  • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

    Because kbin is still new for most people, and the more dedicated moderators are still clinging to their other dieing site.

  • admin@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    Probably because most people don’t know how to use CSS and there isn’t much resources for beginners.

  • Hakaku@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    I played around with it but honestly it’s a bit of a nightmare to support given all the different Kbin user themes and the differences between desktop and mobile. Kbin is also not stable in the sense that new changes are expected and new themes are still being added. I figured I’d wait until it stabilized and/or until someone came up with a decent design you can easily plug and play.