I'd love to change the (Metafilter) world, but I don't know what to do-ooooooo......

December 20, 2006 4:19 AM

StylesheetPonyFilter: I wander the MeFi universe in the Plain Text theme, thus The Blue is white, The Green is white and The Grey is also white. Wouldn't It Be Nice If hyperlinks in the white version of the Blue were blue (which they are), those in the white version of the Green were green and those in the white version of the Grey were grey?
posted by No Mutant Enemy to Feature Requests at 4:19 AM (16 comments total)

OH, GO CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD OR SOMETHING!
posted by quonsar at 4:21 AM on December 20, 2006

You could rig this up yourself pretty easily by adding something like this to your userContent.css file -

@-moz-document domain(ask.metafilter.com)
{
a {color:green ! important;}
}

@-moz-document domain(metatalk.metafilter.com)
{
a {color:grey ! important;}
}

This works with Firefox, and I think Safari and Opera as well (?).
posted by jack_mo at 4:50 AM on December 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

Oop, you probably want to spell grey 'gray'. I just tried it and it is rather pleasing, though the grey links don't really stand out enough compared to the text.

Dunno where you find userContent.css on Windows or Linux, but on OS X, it's in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[random numbers and letters].default/chrome/ for Firefox, and for Safari you probably need to create your own file, stick it somewhere sensible, then under Preferences > Advanced > Stylesheet pick the file you made.
posted by jack_mo at 5:01 AM on December 20, 2006

That kind of CSS frippery kind of defeats the point of "plain text", donchathink?
posted by Johnny Assay at 5:20 AM on December 20, 2006

And: Projects - yellow, Music - black and Jobs - white… hang on.
posted by tellurian at 5:46 AM on December 20, 2006

That kind of CSS frippery kind of defeats the point of "plain text", donchathink?

Not really.
posted by cortex at 5:49 AM on December 20, 2006

Shit, I don't know if that made any sense. I had to change my profile to the default scheme to find out what the site and all its sub-sites looked like in default and I may have got confused. Yes! I am a 'plain text' through and through.
posted by tellurian at 5:52 AM on December 20, 2006

But hey, It's all good. I visited a whole bunch of Metafilter that I don't usually (well, long enough to check out the colour schemes anyway).
posted by tellurian at 6:06 AM on December 20, 2006

Safari: Preferences > Advanced > Select style sheet.
Directions for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:27 AM on December 20, 2006

That kind of CSS frippery kind of defeats the point of "plain text", donchathink?

Nah, it's nice to see at a glance what subsite you're on, and the plain text theme isn't really very plain as it is. I have to remove the logo, the sidebar, the ads, some of the h1 titles, reverse the colour of the live preview box, &c. &c. myself to satisfy a slightly disturbing desire for extreme plainness in sites I read a lot. Might as well just use Lynx, really.
posted by jack_mo at 7:09 AM on December 20, 2006

^ snap.
posted by bonaldi at 7:19 AM on December 20, 2006

You know what would be nice? If you kids could stop shouting. Mama's coming down from her diet pills and she's got a hell of a headache.
posted by Astro Zombie at 7:20 AM on December 20, 2006

I think the purpose of plain is pretty much to be plain across all the subsites.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:24 AM on December 20, 2006

Well, there's a fair bit of colour specified in the existing stylesheet; it's not as though it's all 10 point monospace in black on white. But, whatever; just a thought.
posted by No Mutant Enemy at 7:34 AM on December 20, 2006

I think a better idea would be to add a 5 pixel colored bar at the top of the page.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:07 AM on December 20, 2006

There are Puritans and Roundheads among us? Folks who prefer the drab to the colorful? I, for one, like to rest my eyes from the whitish glare of many text pages and revel in the many hues of the Meta-suite.
I would have made the main page green to match the freshness of the ingenious gems displayed there, and AskMe would have been blue to coincide with the mood of the owners of ailing cats and computers.
But it is not my blog, so I am happy to be here with mathowie's palette.
posted by Cranberry at 1:16 PM on December 20, 2006 [2 favorites]