JBot Mania

…that I am just now discovering.

The plugin is called Stylish. A description from the download site is:

Stylish allows easy management of user styles. User styles empower your browsing experience by letting you fix ugly sites, customize the look of your browser or mail client, or just have fun.

What does this mean? Well, one example where you might want to use this is with FTP sites. Generally speaking, FTP sites are very basic, and to some, intimidating because of that. There isn’t alot of overt direction about what you do when you get to an FTP site through your web browser, even though it’s actually pretty easy.

Using Stylish, however, you can make this interface alot more appealing and clear.

To do this, the key for most people is the related web site userstyles.org. Usestyles.org is a repository for styles that users have created for a variety of purposes, either for specific web sites, specific URLs even, or for general types of sites, which in this case would be anything beginning with ftp://.

Here’s an example of a stylesheet that someone created for any and all FTP sites that you may encounter on the web. As you can see, the interface for an FTP site is completely changed, but through the use of styles that FireFox will apply for you, letting YOU be in charge of how your web looks.

After installing this style into Stylish, any time you go to an FTP site, this is how it will look, no matter which site you go to. You can also turn this off or find a new style if you change your mind.

Pretty handy, eh? Especially if you’re a little hard of seeing or just plain don’t like the layout of some of your favorite sites.

You can also define your own styles, if you should be so bold. I’m not, but it’s a good way to futz around and experiment, as well.

I learned about this plugin from an article by Derek Featherstone where he discusses some styles that he came up with for working with the WCAG Guidelines and Checklist. His contributions can also be found on userStyles.org.

As you can see from the styles he created, he was able to take a site that he visits frequently and make it more usable for himself and for those he collaborates with.

Now these styles were done only for these specific web sites so if you were to use them, initially these styles would only show up for you whenever you ended up on these areas of the WCAG web site. But, you can also manually tell Stylish to apply these styles to other sites. Chances are that something that was defined for one site won’t work well on another, but you never know. See what happens.

Take back the web from people like me.