ben lowery

I took all of my mods to the Bloglines beta and made them available on userstyles.org. Happy hacking!

One problem I have with some feeds, especially photoblogs and comics, is images that are too wide for the new beta interface. I’m a bit odd (I think) in that I like to run with my browser window less than full screen (I have a 1440 x 900 and a 1920 x 1200 screen). I’m generally running with Firefox or Camino at about 800 or 900px wide, which has a number of benefits. It reduces the line size for sites with fluid layouts, making things easier to read, and it allows me to have a couple browsers open side by side by side across the two screens. With this setup, I have about 620px left for article content.

The problem is some feeds have images in them that are quite a bit wider than 620px. To solve this, I use the following bit of CSS with Stylish to fix things up:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document url-prefix("http://beta.bloglines.com/b/view") {
.templateText img {
  max-width: 100% !important;
}
}

Here’s a bit of CSS for stylish to make the Bloglines beta look a bit more like wordpress. Serif fonts FTW:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document url-prefix("http://beta.bloglines.com/b/view") {

.fullviewTemplate .templateText {
  font-size: 100% !important;
  font-family: Georgia !important;
  max-width: 40em !important;
}

.fullviewTemplate .bl_title {
  font-size: 200% !important;
  font-family: Georgia !important;
  padding-top: 20px !important;
}

.fullviewTemplate .bl_datetime {
  position: absolute !important;
  top: 0px !important;
  left: 0px !important;
  text-align: left !important;
}

}

Over at $workplace, we finally pushed out a beta of our redesign ((known affectionately as βloglines)). The redesign is a bit more than just a UI redo; it’s actually a reimplementation from the CGI layer up and takes a much different approach web site construction than the current production site. It’s not quite feature complete vs. the production site, but it’s very useable for day-to-day feed reading for our current users. Definitely check it out and let me know what you think. More to come soon on how we built it and all the fun things we’ve run into. Stay tuned…