8-bitDesign

So, I’m at the coffee shop last night, reading the dead-brilliant “The Difference Engine” (quick bit of algebra for you: William Gibson + Steampunk == Awesome), and decided to look up about a half dozen things in Wikipedia because my knowledge of 19th century Analytical Engines isn’t quite up to par.

Fortunately, I had my nifty N800 with me. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s layout sucks for a cramped device like the N800. Compounding that wonderfully cramped feeling, Kiwi, a Wikipedia client for the iPhone was released today, making it dead easy to surf your favourite bastion of Power Rangers cannon, or Argentinean Government Holidays.

Rather than shell out the cash for an iPhone, I figured I could probably make my Wiki-ing a fair bit easier, which is how I stumbled across User Stylesheets. Sure, I’ve heard about these forever, and supposedly GreaseMonkey has made support for them trivially easy, but I’ve never really dipped my toes into using CSS to edit other people’s websites.

So, over lunch, I sat down, and quickly cobbled together this stylesheet, which strips out the Wikipedia header, footer, and sidebar, and then re-jiggers the text. The net result is a much easier page to read on tiny devices like the N800:

Photo courtesy of my not-iPhone

And here it is mocked up in Firefox, because my phone takes miserable photos:

In Firefox, not on a tiny computer

For anyone who has an N800 and wants to try this out, you just need to load your user specific CSS into

/home/user/.mozilla/microb/chrome/userContent.css

and use Mozilla’s at-rule for domain selectors, so you don’t end up breaking the internet.