Always Professional

April 25, 2013 1:25 PM

Is there a way to maintain the professional white background "plain" theme when not logged in? The solution can be as kludge-y as necessary if anyone wants to explain how I can do this myself; I need it to work on literally one computer.
posted by griphus to Feature Requests at 1:25 PM (26 comments total)

When you log out, we remove the cookies. Is there any reason you can't stay logged in on that computer?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:26 PM on April 25, 2013

Tape a piece of paper (called a stylesheet by us computer people) on your monitor and cut out one slit the width of the screen. You can only read one line at a time, but no one will ever know. Your secret is called html5. Your shame is a greasemonkey.
posted by Think_Long at 1:28 PM on April 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

Is there any reason you can't stay logged in on that computer?

It's a computer I don't want to log into my account while using.
posted by griphus at 1:29 PM on April 25, 2013

You should be able to copy the ugly plain white theme CSS file to your computer and then write a greasemonkey script to use it in place of the default CSS file.
posted by double block and bleed at 1:33 PM on April 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Or even incorporate the plain theme CSS directly into the script.
posted by double block and bleed at 1:34 PM on April 25, 2013

You could use a sock puppet. Costs $5, though.
posted by Quonab at 1:34 PM on April 25, 2013

Yeah you can use the $5 solution.
posted by Justinian at 1:42 PM on April 25, 2013

Stylish with the Metafilter at Work theme gets you pretty close.
posted by desjardins at 1:42 PM on April 25, 2013

This is the css file for the plain theme. On Chrome, use the extension Stylebot to always enforce plain theme by copying all the css into the Stylebot editor.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:44 PM on April 25, 2013

The plain white theme hurts our eyes, precious. It burns us. We hates it, precious!
posted by double block and bleed at 1:46 PM on April 25, 2013 [5 favorites]

But Wait! I found this bookmarklet that does the same as Stylebot. Super easy.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:47 PM on April 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Did you try it griphus? didya?! didya?!
griphus...?
did? try? it? ʕʘ‿ʘʔ
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:58 PM on April 25, 2013 [2 favorites]

Major kludgey way to handle it: Install Proxomitron on that computer. Create a custom rule in it for this particular page, which substitutes "FFFFFF" for the background color.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:59 PM on April 25, 2013

Even kludgier.
posted by Rock Steady at 2:00 PM on April 25, 2013

Did you try it griphus? didya?! didya?!

I'm actually running out of work right now to my cousin's play/reception in midtown so I'm not gonna get a chance until tomorrow morning. I will definitely let you know, though!
posted by griphus at 2:02 PM on April 25, 2013

I just have Anil Dash follow me around with a tube of whiteout.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:09 PM on April 25, 2013 [6 favorites]

Yeah, black type on a white background is crazy. It hasn't worked for centuries.
posted by Elmore at 4:16 PM on April 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Once you're logged out, you can switch to the professional white background by typing "javascript:" in the address bar, pasting this in, and hitting return:

d=new Date(); d.setDate(d.getDate()+36500); document.cookie="THEME=2;domain=.metafilter.com;expires="+d.toUTCString(); location.reload() ;0

This just recreates the professional-white-background cookie that gets deleted when you log out. Seems to work, although personally I find it kind of spooky. That's why I put the winky-open-mouth emoticon at the end.

(The other solutions are probably better, because you won't have to do them every time you log in and back out.)
posted by jhc at 7:53 PM on April 25, 2013 [3 favorites]

did you try it griphus
posted by en forme de poire at 9:25 PM on April 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

I solve this problem by only reading Mefi on a Teletype terminal. I've been considering making the upgrade to a green monochrome phosphor monitor, but so far I can't find a justification for the expense.

Teletype paper is expensive. Dumb terminals are cheap.
posted by double block and bleed at 4:38 AM on April 26, 2013

¿snɥdıɹb 'ʇı ʎɹʇ noʎ pıp
posted by double block and bleed at 5:22 AM on April 26, 2013

Yeah, black type on a white background is crazy. It hasn't worked for centuries.

It works great on paper, because it doesn't glow.
posted by double block and bleed at 5:25 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

Did you try it griphus? didya?! didya?!
griphus...?
did? try? it? ʕʘ‿ʘʔ

Yes! The bookmarklet wanted me to reenter the CSS every time I visited the page (unless I was doing it wrong) but the complete Stylebot plugin is perfect! Thank you!
posted by griphus at 6:40 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

I used to control the appearance of sites where I didn't want the colours and images to show up by going into the browser options menus and setting them to ignore all website styles and instead use my own defined fonts and colours - and to replace all images with a placeholder that I'd need to click before it loaded the image up. It made most websites look hideous, but it did the job and I could turn it on and off pretty quickly as I needed to.
posted by talitha_kumi at 7:04 AM on April 26, 2013

If you're using Firefox, install NoSquint and as well as per-site zoom persistence you get a nice GUI for setting per-site custom text and background colors; no fartarsing about with CSS required.
posted by flabdablet at 10:37 AM on April 26, 2013

With the Firefox Stylish extension is another good way to make whatever per-site CSS adjustments you like.
posted by Zed at 12:23 AM on April 29, 2013