love is all around

Do you have a website that you use regularly, but take issue with the designer’s choice of colors? Or maybe you find a site to be too busy - offering you way more information then you need day-to-day? Or you just want to get rid of the ads?

A new Firefox plugin called Stylish lets you do just that. Now you can restyle any website - overriding the original style. Even changing images and fonts. Better yet, you can share your created style with others on userstyles.org. If the site you’re using is popular, someone else has probably already styled it.

I just created a style, Bloglines Efficient, for Bloglines.com - the site I probably use more than any other. Bloglines is fairly garish and high-contrast, and contains lots of stuff I never use. Since screen real-estate is gold, I don’t want anything I don’t use taking up space.

Here’s the before picture.

My style does the following:

• Cleans things up
  • Removes tons of unneeded links and images - makes the display much more compact and less busy and distracting.
  • Makes the headline links a little smaller - means I can fit more on the page, and scroll less.
  • Removes headline link underlining - I find the headlines easier to read without underlines.
  • Remove the large feed icons - Some of the feed icons are pretty ugly, and they just take up space.
• Lowers the contrast
  • Swaps the blues for grays - I find the gray just easier to look at.
  • Makes the tree links dark gray instead of black
  • De-saturates the folder images

Here’s what it looks like after.