Buster Benson

These instructions will explain how to use the template I made to view your Livejournal Friends page on your phone's browser in a format that's a little easier to read. It looks something like this.

This is not the easiest thing in the world to do, you'll get into some of LJ's ugly (but powerful) guts, but hopefully these instructions are clear enough that there's not much room for error if you follow them exactly.

Make sure you have a paid Live Journal account.
Go to the advanced customization layers page.
Click on "Your Styles".
Create a new style (at the bottom of the page). Enter "iPhone" as the name. Click "Create".
Leave the Language dropdown alone, and in the Layout dropdown, go to the very bottom and select "Other"...
Enter "13000933" into the Layer ID field.
Click "Change".
Ignore the Language, Theme, and User dropdowns. Just click "Save Changes".
Find the line for "iPhone" under the "Your Styles" heading, and save of the number that is linked there. Don't include the # sign. This is your STYLE ID which you'll use in the next step to create a link.
Go to this page: http://YOUR_USERNAME.livejournal.com/friends?s2id=YOUR_STYLE_id&.id=YOUR_STYLE_ID_AGAIN&auth=digest
If you open that link in your iPhone, you should be all set up. Try emailing it to yourself, or just type it into the browser on your iPhone.

Let me know if that works or doesn't work. And what you think should be changed. I believe that I can continue to improve the template and have it take effect across everone using it, but I haven't tested it out yet.

I tried to make a cool icon for the iPhone in case people bookmarked it, but unfortunately Live Journal strips out any <link> tags.

Tags: best of 2008

( 19 comments — Leave a comment )

joshc

2008-09-12 10:29 pm (UTC)

works for me! awesome.

busterbenson

2008-09-12 10:48 pm (UTC)

Sweet.

j_u_d_i

works like a charm. Thanks!

2008-09-12 10:49 pm (UTC)

You're welcome!

endquote

2008-09-12 11:55 pm (UTC)

At step 9, there's the style id -- which you can just click on to view your journal in that style. Then you can stick "/friends" in the url to get the friends page. Then you get a simpler URL like: http://YOUR_USERNAME.livejournal.com/friends/?s2id=YOUR_STYLE_ID

Works great for me. The only thing I can think of to add would be something that tells if you're logged in or not.

2008-09-13 12:13 am (UTC)

(Oops, was logged in as Kellianne for testing purposes...)

Good point about the logged in/logged out info.

Yeah, you can click that link, but in order to get other links to work you'll have to add the "&.id=STYLE_ID" to the URL because of the lame way that the templates don't let you read URL params unless they're preceded by a period.

I should also add the "&auth=digest" to the url so that you have to log in first... I'll edit that in.

2008-09-13 07:19 pm (UTC)

You should totally post this to

lj_nifty too.

interimlover

2008-09-15 11:52 pm (UTC)

works great!

ozw

2008-09-27 08:14 pm (UTC)

Thanks so much for this. It looks/works great.

sinnick

2008-10-04 12:30 am (UTC)

Works great for me. Thanks!

ramblingwebgirl

2008-12-20 05:27 am (UTC)

Works like a charm. Thanks so much!

sluggobear

2008-12-30 08:10 pm (UTC)

OMG AWESOME!

2008-12-30 08:48 pm (UTC)

LOVING this. Way handy!

Thought I'd throw some feedback since you asked. These are way minor.

- I'd go with a slightly larger font for the body text.
- I'd make the Post link go to this URL instead of blogit: http://www.livejournal.com/mobile/post.bml
- I'd make the user icons a little larger.
- I'd put the actual date instead of just the day. (12/30/08 instead of Tue)

In the end, these are just me being picky, they're mostly design choices and I realize that they'll take-up more screen real estate, but just my two cents.

AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME. Thank you for this!