Major breakthrough (Stylish & userstyles.org)

It all started with being annoyed with websites. One major annoyance was a change to the design of the BBC website. The main story column got narrower. Fonts got ridiculously bigger. There’s a certain threshold of space-wasting that goes beyond what I can stand. Recently many websites have gotten notably worse.

Then I found out about Stylish. I initially installed Stylish and then search on the associated site userstyles.org for any relevant styles that would work with bbc.com. In fact there were some styles, but nothing that was what I wanted.

So, eventually, over time, I started trying to manipulate, and then create, styles. And now it is amazing. Over the past few days I’ve basically redesigned all the main web sites that I visit. The effect is intense. It feels like I am recreating the Internet that was supposed to be, but that got ruined back around the time that AOL happened.

For any given site I want to change, I create a new style in Stylish, then on the page in question (it can be any page that is typical of that website, usually an article page since I usually open article links from RSS feeds). Then I open Inspector, which is part of the Firefox developer tools, with Shift-Ctrl-C.

At this point it almost seems like playing a video game, maybe even more fun. Pick elements on a page I don’t want and wipe them out. They are gone. It feels so gratifying.

Resizing columns is probably the trickiest thing to do as there are usually a lot of div tags containing and wrapping multiple things. When I finally got bbc.com to resize it was like a major breakthrough.

Not only am I removing a vast amount of junk like all the “like” and “share” stuff, but I’m also making content panes wider, switching from ghastly, unreadable sans-serif fonts to serif, and reducing line spacing. The improvements are simply remarkable.

As I now visit all the sites that I have customized it feels like a revolution. It feels like this is the way the Internet is supposed to be. I’m also learning a bit more about CSS and how professional sites are organized.

I cannot tell you what a relief it is to read an article on a site which before was cluttered with all this garbage and now basically only contains the content I want, formatted the way I want. There is something really Zen about it. Instead of visiting a page and feeling like I’m being attacked by all this privacy-invading garbage, now everything is clean, simple, and pure.