The Lair

This is a Greasemonkey script I started writing a couple of weeks ago. I had a specific set of needs from a site I visit on occasion and it seemed like a Greasemonkey script would be the easiest way to accomplish what I needed. It also helped alleviate the boredom of some tedious quarterly report writing. Yeah, and some of the JavaScript used in the script will be reused for another (work) project.

All of these are poorly disguised justifications after the fact, but what does the script do? Well, when I do visit kottu.org, I do so for a specific reason - to be entertained by the aggregated blogs on show. I don’t need the Flickr streams; and I consider the blogroll and much of the sidebar redundant. In most cases, I also don’t need to read the short excerpt. Scan the headlines, in and out. But the existing layout didn’t let me do this easily.

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We had a fire alarm yesterday. No, more accurately, we had fire alarms (note: plural). The usual setup around here is that there is an annual fire drill conducted around spring time. We had our fire drill for 2006 about two weeks ago. The first time the fire alarm went off yesterday, a lot of people could have been excused for thinking it was the weekly test of the alarm system - except it was the wrong day of the week.

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I’ve realized that I have very definite opinions about what makes a website work for me. Or rather, I know what doesn’t work. The problem (if indeed it is a problem) is that my views are necessarily subjective and I wouldn’t want to impose them on anyone else. Well, except in the case of this blog, where I generally have the layout most suited to my reading habits and screen resolution.

For example, I prefer smaller fonts because that allows more information to fit into one screen. I’m not necessarily against scrolling to read a long page; but I’d prefer not to. I also prefer liquid layouts, where the content on screen can expand to accommodate a reasonably high screen resolution. If there is a lot of varied content, I’d prefer to have information arranged so as to allow scanning, without needing to read through a lot of (to me) irrelevant crap to get to the meat, as it were.

All other things (such as liquid layout) aside, one thing most people can’t stand in that laundry list above is the smaller fonts requirement. I can see why this is the case. When I was stuck with a lousy CRT at one point, I turned the screen resolution down to 800×600 to spare my eyes. Fortunately, I don’t need to do this anymore, so the screen resolution is turned up high - so as to fit in a lot of information into one screen. My point is, what works for me doesn’t necessarily work for someone else.

So I could go around building websites that suit only myself and fit all the information I want on screen and widen layouts to accommodate a reasonable screen resolution. Impractical, though. I’d be confined to reading my own content. Or, I could do what everyone else does and ignore the niggles. In fact, if you’ve bothered reading this far, you’re probably wondering why the heck I’m ranting about something quite so inconsequential as web page layout and arranging information. Think of the people starving in sub Saharan Africa, etc.

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