David Emery Online

Website Skinning

11 October 2006

It never ceases to amaze me how many things you can do these days with modern browsers and CSS; the scope for hacking and customisability is huge due to most modern browsers ability (whether built in or by plugins) to use a custom css file to change a website’s appearance.

A case in point comes today from the always interesting Jon Hicks in the form of a custom skin for Bloglines. As regular readers will know, I’m a bit of a Bloglines fanatic (I currently have 499 feeds a read every day), but it’s not the nicest site to look at so this skin is more then welcome.

If you take a look at the picture above you’ll see a couple of differences with the version on Jon’s site, which hits on another bonus with CSS skinning – it’s really easy to wade into the source and change any bits you don’t like. I’ve made a couple of changes to remove the wood effect seen on Jon’s original, and to change the feed list so it’s move like Mail.app’s source list.

Jon says in the comments of his post that a non-wood version is coming soon, so I’m not going to polish it up and release it (he did all the hard work, anyway!) but the point is that it really is pretty easy – especially if you’re using either a recent (nightly build) of Safari, OmniWeb 5.5 or Firefox with plugins which all let you inspect the elements of a page to discover their css classes, ids and properties.

If I have the time I’m very tempted to see if a similar thing could be done with the Textpattern admin interface – I really like the look of the Wordpress Tiger Admin Theme and I wonder if we could do something similar for Textpattern…