MonTemplar's Journal: Customising Slashdot

(Slow news day, so I'll do News That Matters later today).

As I mentioned previously, I've been doing a fair amount of work to customise the information on the homepage to suit my purposes. Although this has been mostly successful, I do have a couple of complaints about the current options :

1. Section Slashboxes show all stories, ignoring any exclusions that you specified elsewhere in the Preferences. For instance, the BSD Slashbox includes all the announcements of updates to the BSDs and associated projects, whereas I'm more interested in the tangential stories (BSD vs Windows, BSD vs Microsoft, security-related stuff, etc.)

   Can it be that hard to pump out the same set of story-links that I'd get from visiting the Section homepage?

2. The User Space box, which should enable you to include links to your favourite websites, is effectively crippled by a (undisclosed) text limit. This is what I've currently got in mine :

   <A HREF="search.pl?topic=109">MS</a> <A HREF="search.pl?topic=201">Windows</a> <A HREF="search.pl?topic=113">IE</a> <A HREF="search.pl?topic=154">Moz</a> <A HREF="search.pl?topic=107">Apple</a> <A HREF="search.pl?topic=179">OSX</a>

   That's a grand total of six links, and I only managed that by making them local to slashdot.org, abbreviating, and ditching line-breaks. Not terribly useful, as far as I can see.

   I'd suggest scrapping the current set-up with a 'scrapbook' of links, like the ones generated alongside each story, that you can copy into. In fact, stick a little button onto the stories, and next to comments that include links, to make it even easier.

3. Whilst you can easily tell Slashdot what you're not interested in, via the Preferences, there's no real way to tell it what you are interested in. How about a My Topics area on the left, underneath the Sections, where you can stick the topics that you like to read about? Click the link, go to a search on that topic.
4. A message at the top of the screen to tell you if you have new Messages would be nice when you're reading stories.
5. Not specifically to do with the homepage, but how about some extra stats on your User Info box? In particular, the number of Friends/Fans/Foes/Freaks you've got would be great.

Without any knowledge of the Slashcode, I've no way of telling how feasible some of these are. Am I asking for too much?

Stylesheets

[sql*kitten]

What I'd really like is to be able to have a personal stylesheet, or even templates for some pages, so I can embded by journal in a frame in my own site and have a nice clean look-and-feel, rather than the mess that Slashdot is at the moment, yet still use the Slashdot back end. Hell, I'm a paying customer, and I think I'd pay more for this feature. The stylesheet would apply to a) a browser with my cookie set and b) everything below /~sql*kitten/ . It's not that difficult...

Re:Stylesheets

[Surak]

You can do this ... well USERS can do this for themselves on the browser end [dessent.net] with Privoxy [privoxy.org].

A good idea

[Rudy Rodarte]

Just like the Taco's links and Hemos' links, could they make a "Rudy's Links" with 5 or 10 of my favorite links? I would like that. Also, let us be able to change the color, if we wish. My boss and co-workers easily detect "slashdot green"

Re:A good idea

[OldMiner]

You've got three choices available to you to fix that already.

1. Go to your preferences [slashdot.org], click on the checkbox labelled Light right near the top, then submit the form. Now, use your user stylesheet [squarefree.com] to set default background and foreground colors.
2. Use a user stylesheet [squarefree.com] by default with your colors for things marked as !important [w3.org].
3. Use a browser which supports [macedition.com] CSS selectors [w3.org] and a user style sheet. Make your user style sheet customize the colors for slashdot alone by selecting by URL.

Naturally, if this is an

messages

[robi2106]

Messages are posted to the main page. I guess that is as close as they wanted to get, with out adding complexity to the story pages.

jason