Okay, so I have a MySpace account, now. I am a little late to this phenomenon, but I have a lot of friends who use it, and it is a convenient way to keep in touch with those people.
There’s only one problem: no offense intended to anyone (really; please!), but MySpace is a showcase for everything that could possibly go wrong with web page design. It is the antithethis of the CSSZenGardens of the web. It seems there are even many external sites where you can find pre-built “myspace templates” — some of which, at least, are not even compatible with Firefox (gasp).
What to do? Well, the obvious answer would be to avoid the site altogether. But, if you’re decided, like I have, that keeping in touch with friends is more important than being a web-design snob, there is hope.
For starters, I assume you are using Firefox for a web browser. (If you are not — why not? Welcome to the 21st century, it can be found here.)
There is a Firefox extension called Stylish — install this, and restart Firefox. Then visit a MySpace page, and click the “Stylish” Icon in the status bar; a new tab or window will open to the site userstyles.org, showing you various options which have been created for MySpace stylesheets — in my case, I chose a style called MySpace Sanitizer which basically removes almost all styles, and presents you with a clean, clear, black-text-on-white-background page instead of whatever abomination had previously dwelled there. Ah. Much better.
Yes, I know, people put a lot of time and effort into the way their pages look; that’s fine. If I’m going to visit someone’s page, though, I’m going to see what they have to say. Not to look at a strange polkadot background and text colored in such a way that I can barely read it, thanks.
Once again; no offense intended to the 65 million denizens of MySpace; I would actually guess that many MySpacers would love to get ahold of this extension. ;-)
