LJ's missing option

[vakkotaur]

LiveJournal has a good many options to select so you can tweak the "look and feel" of your journal and friends list and such to your taste. This is all fine and as it should be. Give a user choice and let the user make the choices. Those with paid accounts get more control. No problem. That's providing value for money.

But one thing is missing. And it's a rather big omission, I think. That is a choice to see other's LJ entries and friends lists with the same style and color choices as one's own.

Some might say that would remove some individuality or such. And yes, it means that the look for someone else wouldn't be the same as the look for oneself. So what? Wouldn't the benefit of not encountering a jarring change of style or hyperactive color scheme outweigh that? And if you like an odd style and raucous color scheme, you could set it so everything looks that way to you. An inconsistent interface is generally bug. Why not get rid of this bug? But make it an option, so those who, for whatever reason, want changing colors and style can still have them.

The only problem may be one server load. It'd be one more thing for the machinery to do. But would it be that big of a deal? It already has to get the information for a look, this would mean it'd have to get it from a different source is all. It probably isn't quite as easy as it sounds, by I expect the benefit would be worth the trouble. Why, it might even be worth paying for a feature that good.

There's probably some place to make this suggestion (if it has not yet been made) but I haven't looked for it very hard - yet.

Comments

[bronxelf-ag001.livejournal.com]

um.... I see all my friends page stuff in the same style as my page. I'm not sure I understand what you mean? Go check my friends page (from my page) to look.

[timmowarner.livejournal.com]

I think he'd like your page and friends page to be in his style when he looks at it. So he only ever sees one style the whole time.

Personally, I almost never look at somebody's page directly. Which is dumb because sometimes I scroll and scroll and scroll through my friends' posts to find their last one instead of just checking their journal and making it easy.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

What I mean is the ability to have any page I look at be set to my style choices. Right now, I control my main page and my friends list. And everyone else controls their main page and their friends list. But sometimes I look at someone else's main page or friends list and wonder what they were thinking. For example, the page layout with everything in different overlapping boxes might be just great for those who want it, but I'd rather not deal with it.

I'm not saying anyone else should have to look at my style choice unless they want to, but that nobody should really have to look at style choice other than their own. If they want to look at other choices, fine. But I'd rather have my (admittedly plain) style every time.

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=164

[mortonfox.livejournal.com]

If the user you're viewing is using S2, you can change the style. Just append ?s2id=[some number], e.g. http://www.livejournal.com/users/someuser?s2id=16

I don't know yet if you can change other aspects of the layout, such as colors, but the info is probably out there.