Why is no one decorating their magazines?

3 years ago by Jaysyn to c/AskKbin

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 67 points 3 years 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!

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Saturdaycat 27 points 3 years ago

I am definitely stuck at #5

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Jaysyn 11 points 3 years ago

ChatGTP can be pretty useful for this.

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Saturdaycat 9 points 3 years ago

Hmm what about Google bard ?

Okay, so why am I being reduced just because I mentioned Bard?

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JackGreenEarth 7 points 3 years ago

@Saturdaycat That's only available from 18 years old+ (you have to give google your age/credit card data) and is otherwise tracked by Google. Is not so much better than the comparatively unrestricted Bing Chat

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Jaysyn 4 points 3 years ago

I've not used it personally.

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Kill_joy 3 points 3 years ago

Following :) I know nothing about code and if Bard is helpful, it would be amazing!

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Greyson 1 point 3 years ago

It's very useful for this. I have a moderately good understanding of CSS styling after spending 2 weeks on a work side project using GPT 3.5 and 4.0. Had absolutely 0 prior coding experience.

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May 4 points 3 years 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.

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CMLVI 2 points 3 years 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

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cutitdown 4 points 3 years 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.

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artisanrox 3 points 3 years ago

I absolutely LOVED GeoCities and totally miss that everyone-is-an-indie vibe.

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Saturdaycat 2 points 3 years ago

Oh jeebus my first website online was Xanga, and I copied the shit out of code back then to bling it up

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cutitdown 2 points 3 years ago

Haha, definitely! Had to have that autoplaying music when people came to your page!

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Xeelee 3 points 3 years ago

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

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Lells 4 points 3 years 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.

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Catch42 2 points 3 years 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)

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ProfThadBach 1 point 3 years 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.

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wahming 39 points 3 years ago

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

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GizmoLion 9 points 3 years ago

Yep, every time. I was on reddit to read the content, not browse myspace lol.

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Jaysyn 2 points 3 years ago

I haven't found that option yet.

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wahming 18 points 3 years ago

Oh no, that doesn't exist here yet. I was referring to the option in old reddit

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H2SO4 13 points 3 years ago

I'm in the same boat. So I just threw together a quick userscript which removes custom CSS on magazines:
https://greasyfork.org/...

You'll need Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey (browser addons) or similar to install the script.

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harmonea 2 points 3 years 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)

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RheingoldRiver 1 point 3 years 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 :)

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FermatsLastAccount 1 point 3 years ago

I think that was an RES option

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cdiv 7 points 3 years 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.

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mac 18 points 3 years ago

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

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Jaysyn 3 points 3 years 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.

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FfaerieOxide 13 points 3 years 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.

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Jaysyn 6 points 3 years 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.

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Balssh 2 points 3 years 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).

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Warped 13 points 3 years ago

A majority can't even be bothered to post anything in their magazines.

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May 9 points 3 years 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.

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Jaysyn 1 point 3 years ago

I guess I assumed more reddit mods were coming over.

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CMLVI 3 points 3 years 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.

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mrnotoriousman 2 points 3 years ago

I imagine there will be a big influx on the 1st once the apps they use to mod stop working.

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EnglishMobster 9 points 3 years 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.

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Voyajer 8 points 3 years ago

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

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atocci 3 points 3 years ago

I just tested and sadly no

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atocci 6 points 3 years ago

I got some basic theming set up at my magazine after looking up what CSS is.

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garrettw87 2 points 3 years ago

Nice gradient!

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Jaysyn 1 point 3 years ago

Looks good!

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joobeejoo47 1 point 3 years 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.

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atocci 3 points 3 years 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/...) 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);
}

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sensibilidades 6 points 3 years ago

I must be in the minority here, I turned off sub-specific CSS as soon as I could.

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BaroqueInMind 5 points 3 years ago

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

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a_mac_and_con 3 points 3 years ago

As a magazine having a custom CSS isn't important for whether I decide to interact with a community, I'm much more focused on other methods of gathering an audience and activity which isn't just me posting over and over.

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cutitdown 3 points 3 years ago

I've done some decorating over at https://kbin.social/m/ArcBrowser. Not done yet, but for Arc Browser users, the colors will adjust to match your browser theme!

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garrettw87 2 points 3 years ago

Fancy!

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DarkThoughts 3 points 3 years ago

Is this really the look you were going for..?

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Jaysyn 1 point 3 years ago

Yes. Is something wrong with that?

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admin 3 points 3 years ago

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

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Prej 2 points 3 years ago

I did it, waiting for the results. Still new to CSS, but I used ChatGPT and it worked pretty well.

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atocci 2 points 3 years ago

I didn't even realize that was possible here! I'm definitely going to look into it now, but I also have no idea how CSS works.

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Hakaku 2 points 3 years 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.

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Fern 2 points 3 years ago

Feels a bit like myspace looking through all these.

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PrimalHero 1 point 3 years ago

I did not know that is was possible. Maybe I will play around with it but I am kinda afraid of making everything ugly.

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patchw3rk 1 point 3 years ago

I'm a mod. My subreddit (kbin.social/m/bestof) will not get a facelift any time soon, I don't think. Aren't people expecting to customize their own view of all communities?

Also, do the visuals persist to all of the fediverse? How does your community look on kbin, lemmy, etc?

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garrettw87 1 point 3 years ago

Visuals definitely would not federate.

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yunggwailo 1 point 3 years ago

I dont know how lmao

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garrettw87 1 point 3 years ago

I have /m/learnesperanto and I am slowly working on sprucing up the CSS. So far all I’ve really done is add a green bottom border to some link hovers in the sidebar.

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realcaseyrollins 1 point 3 years ago

I didn't even know that was a thing, that's kinda cool!

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missingno 1 point 3 years ago

Let's just say graphic design is not my passion.

That said, if anyone who does know how to art wants to do anything with /m/splatoon, /m/fgc, or /m/mahjong, I'd be happy to add you aboard.

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callyral 0 points 3 years ago

i would but it'd be too interesting for my magazine

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garrettw87 1 point 3 years ago

What does “too interesting” even mean?

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