MySpace and stylesheets
Wednesday, November 29th, 2006Yes, that's right, I'm hooked on MySpace again. Call it a "MySpace renaissance," if you will.
MySpace lacks lots of things that, for a price tag of over $500 million, you think Rupert Murdoch would have come up with by now. To wit:
- A MySpace API. This would allow third-party developers to create applications that grab and render MySpace data - friend lists, profiles, bulletins, etc. At first glance, this might appear to dilute MySpace traffic - why would anyone go to MySpace and click on their many annoying ads, if someone else could just pull that data and place it on another site? But this is a great misunderstanding of the nature of web syndication - the idea is to provide enough information to lure people to the site. With a good API, I can look at my friends' pages through my own site, and even search for new friends - but if I want to add someone as my friend, listen to new music, watch videos, or any other host of things, I have to go to MySpace to do it.
- Better searching. MySpace's search engine kinda sucks. For example, let's say I'm looking for an old college friend named Jane Smith. Too bad her name isn't something like Cleopatra Smithereen; as it is, there are gazillions of Jane Smiths. Now, I haven't seen Jane in ten years, so all I really know for sure is her name and what college she went to - too bad there's no way in MySpace to put those two pieces of information together for a search (or at least, not one I've seen). So now I can either (a) do a search for "Jane Smith," and sort through the ninety metric tons of results; or (b) browse alumni for my college, which, coincidentally, averages twenty thousand students a year. Let's hope through all of this that Jane hasn't gotten married and changed her name - MySpace provides no reliable way to collate maiden names and the like.
- Update information. One of the things I adore about Friendster is that it tells me when my friends update their profiles, and how they've updated them. I wish MySpace could easily do the same.
- A way to turn off music and other frills. Listen, I realize you all love the ability to add music to your MySpace profile, and that's great for you. But my primary computer is a 12 inch Mac Powerbook with a 867 megahertz G4 processor. What that means is that if I visit a MySpace profile with music playing, and some flash components, and slideshows, and all kinds of other random tripe, my computer slows way down, the fan kicks on, and all manner of hijinks ensue. It would be really nice if there were some account setting somewhere called, I dunno, "simplify pages." Because when I visit your MySpace page, I don't really care about all those little frills. I care about you.
It's possible to use custom stylesheets to clean up MySpace and make it much more viewable; this is how I've managed to spend way, way too much time there without my browser crashing every ten seconds. Danny Dawson developed a stylesheet for Firefox that effectively sanitizes MySpace. You can follow his instructions for using it, though if you're on a Mac, said stylesheet goes here:
/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[gobbledygook].default/chrome/
It turns out that you can use the same stylesheet for MySpace sanitation under Safari. There are several steps to this process:
- Install SafariStand, which allows you to perform all kinds of great customizations.
- Next, copy userContent.css to
/Users/[your username]/Library/Safari/Stand/UserStyleSheets
.
- Open userContent.css in your favorite text editor; at the top of the document, you should see a line that looks like this:
@-moz-document domain(myspace.com) {
Delete that line, along with a closing bracket at the very end of the document. Save it.
- Launch Safari (or restart it, if it's already running) and look at the menu bar; there should be an entry there entitled "Stand." Go to Stand -> SafariStand Setting … and click the menu item entitled "Site Alteration." Click the box labeled "Enable Site Alteration" .
- Click the button labeled "Add." Make sure the "match pattern" box contains the string "myspace.com". Find and click a box towards the bottom labeled "Alter: User StyleSheet Location:". Below that, you'll see an input box and a little arrow pointing down. Click on the arrow and choose "userContent.css".
- Repeat the above step to create two more items: one with a "match pattern" for "www.myspace.com", and one for "profile.myspace.com". Close the SafariStand settings window.
- Click on Stand -> Site Alteration, and browse MySpace. Everything should be tidy now.
If you're using Internet Explorer, sorry, you're on your own.
And if you'd like to befriend me through the wicked hell-on-the-net that we call MySpace, you can find me here.
