posted
I've been messing around with Firefox recently, involving some playing with the userContent.css file. This file allows you to specify your own stylesheet for pages on the web, so you can customize them to your own liking.
I created a couple tweaks so far, and due to the incomplete usage of CSS on this old copy of UBB, it would be difficult to make many more, but I'm sure there are ways to get around it.
Here's what I did:
I made quotes look better: (box with outline, purple text)
{code} {/code} is green text in the same sort of box.
Posts that I make have my username in bigger green text. (To change this, edit my user# to your own-- bolded in the code)
Posts by kacard, our friendly administrator have her username in bigger red text.
This file can be used to tweak the way the Hatrack forum appears. The only problem with using this method is that your tweaks might spill over onto other pages, making them look different than they should. To solve this problem, I installed the URIid Firefox extension. That made it so I could specify that these tweaks should only be used on this forum. Here is a screenshot of what the tweaks look like in action.If anybody wants to use them, below is all the code you need. In order to use this code you must:
Use Mozilla Firefox/Mozilla Suite
Download the URIid extension (allowing for site-specific CSS tweaks)
put the following code in your userContent.css file *instructions below*
*Instructions for editing your userContent.css file: Mozilla's instructions (link)My instructions: With a new Firefox installation, this file is not automatically created. A file called userContent-example.css is placed in the correct directory, however. You can rename this file to userContent.css and edit it to add this code. If you haven't messed with userContent.css before, the code you copy into it will be the only contents of the file.
In Windows XP, the directory is something like: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.z91\chrome\
I don't really know if anybody else around here wants to do this, but I'm trying to teach myself CSS, and doing this was an interesting exercise. If anybody has any tips for me, or any improvements, or anything at all, let me know.
A couple other useful tools:
bbCode Firefox extension (instructions) - Make posting BB code easier (this has many features Hatrack can't use, but for things like bold, italic, quotes, code, and urls, this is very useful. (I even made this list with it)
http://bugmenot.com/ - database of registration information for sites like nytimes.com that require you to register before you can read articles. There's also a Firefox Extension
[ January 11, 2005, 03:36 AM: Message edited by: Nato ]
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
Is there any way to make Ralphie's posts bright orange and blinky? It would save me a lot of time if I didn't have to wade through everyone else's posts to find hers. Lately the Ralphie-to-noise ratio has been pretty low.
posted
[bump]Shamless bump, but I promise it will be the only one![/bump]
Incidentally, I spent part of my afternoon today with Illustrator making a draft of a logo for my Ultimate frisbee team. We're U. of Oregon's B-Team, named "Daisy" (Think Daisy Duck and how bad it is to be beaten by a team named "Daisy.")
posted
I dunno if it's the tweaks, Nato, but all your posts are freakishly wide and they're messing up the forum's forumness.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:I dunno if it's the tweaks, Nato, but all your posts are freakishly wide and they're messing up the forum's forumness.
It's the big code blocks with long lines, sorry! the <pre> tag that the forum uses for {code} doesn't allow for line breaks. Edit: Okay, I went back and put in some line breaks. Hopefully the forum's forumness isn't as messed up for you anymore.
/*Make Porter's username a pretty shade of blue: */ body.uriid-www-hatrack-com-ubb tr td a[href='http://www.hatrack.com/ubb/cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_profile;u=00004644'] { color: #5555FF !important; /* This is the line to edit text color. */ font-size: 200% !important; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif !important; }
[ January 11, 2005, 03:59 AM: Message edited by: Nato ]
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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quote: Is there any way to make Ralphie's posts bright orange and blinky? It would save me a lot of time if I didn't have to wade through everyone else's posts to find hers. Lately the Ralphie-to-noise ratio has been pretty low.
This made me laugh out loud. So much that I had to type the entire thing out.
Very flattering, Shigosei. Thank you. Posts: 7600 | Registered: Jan 2001
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Cool, Nato! I'm impressed with your CSS abilities (or abilitiez if that's not l33t enough for you).
quote:Very flattering, Shigosei. Thank you.
Just doing my part to spread the Ralphie Luv! It's great to have you back. I'm glad you liked my post. Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
Hahaha, no. "Abilities" is plenty fine for me, and I'm really barely skilled at all. I'm in the early stages of learning CSS for sure. It took me about 6 hours just to get my little front page of my "website" switched from HTML tables to CSS. (And there are still some big problems with it that I can't figure out.)
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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Can you think of any way that would allow Firefox to display external images? I was trying to wrap my head around this one but I currently have a beer-powered buzz keeping my thoughts from myself.
Posts: 4753 | Registered: May 2002
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Easiest way would be to just use CSS to set the background image of a handy element to an image (hosted whereever, CSS can use absolute URLs).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Umm, I think this is possible, but I'll have to look into it a little more. Right now I'm leaving for a basketball game, but I'll be back in a few hours, and I'll give it a look.
Some people I know at another forum have a lot of tweaks that work there (it's vBullitin-based, not UBB, so there is a lot more CSS already integrated to work with). I know they've been able to get image links to display inline there, but it might have been through a Firefox extension. I'll check it out.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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The hard part would be to get the link to display the correct image AND display that image at the correct size. Puzzling.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
I don't quite remember. It was mostly cleaning up the code, and I think I fixed a couple little things with the QUOTE and CODE boxes.
----
To the images issue, I'm not sure we'll be able to do this with the userContent.css file. It's got some pretty heavy coding involved.
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
I found some javascript that might do the task (probably there are some bugs because I didn't understand what I was doing very well), but I can't figure out how to get it written on the page.
Is there any way to get a javascript script written on the page with the usercontent.css file? (I want it to be Hatrack-specific instead of just adding it to the main OnLoad() for every page.)
Posts: 1592 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
Ah, I had been searching for that class of selectors, but was missing it for some reason. It would be better to use the [attribute$=] attribute selector, as that matches to the end of the string.
*sigh* if only one could write url(attr(href)) in a content property.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I finally succumbed to firefox, just recently. I LOVE IT. Crazily. I love the tabs option. (fiddles with it) When I get back from work, I wanna put some of these weird codey things on it. With like, some of the cool people at Hatrack. MUWAHAHA.
Posts: 4816 | Registered: Apr 2003
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