grub's Journal: Kill /.'s IT colour scheme with Privoxy.

NB: If you're not familiar with Privoxy go stand in the corner and read the FAQs.

Welcome back. OK, so you're like me: you hate the IT colour scheme with a passion. How do you fix it? Simple, install Privoxy (if you haven't already) and add these custom config lines. My filter is running on an OpenBSD gateway at home and a good sized OpenBSD proxy at work but you can get Privoxy for many systems including Windows.

Note the first line in the default filter is commented out. You can add it in which will make a lot of the other filters redundant but will make browsing the actual IT pages go back to the main page. Take your pick.
NB:slashcode is adding spaces in these filters. If there's no "\" before a space in a regex it's probably a slashcode addition.

Add the following to your default.filter file:

FILTER: slashdot-cleanup Make /. eyeball friendly.
#s/it\.slashdot\.org/slashdot\.org/ig
s/bgcolor=\"898163\"/bgcolor=\"006666\"/ig
s/bgcolor=\"EBEBE1\"/bgcolor=\"CCCCCC\"/ig
s/LINK=\"898163\"/LINK=\"006666\"/ig
s/\/slashtitle\-it\.gif/\/title\.gif/g
s/\/slash(bar-it|corner-it)\.gif//ig

Now add the following to your user.action file:

{ +filter{slashdot-cleanup} }
.slashdot.org

Restart Privoxy if needed. Configure your browser to use the filter. Now check out the IT section It should be clean.

There's one minor gotcha: a small pic called slashcorner-it.gif is just dropped so you get a blank square rather than a rounded corner in the headings. The nice green scheme works a bit differently there and frankly I don't want to waste a lot of time on it. I haven't played very much with this filtering so YMMV.

Feel free to post updates/fixes here.

grub

What colors?

[nizo]

Oh wait, I am browsing in low-bandwidth mode, never mind :-) Thanks for the link though, you never know when something like this might be useful. Maybe I can setup our new proxy at work so when people see "Bush" they instead see "our idiot president" or somesuch.

Colors

[dead sun]

I find the IT colors to be a lot less eyebiting than the Games colors. Yow.

Re:Colors

[grub]

Them modify the games colours in a privoxy filter! ;)

Re:Colors

[grub]

A universal "Normal Slashdot Green" theme is doable. Maybe tonight...

Dang!

[enigmals1]

And I thought I was anal about stuff. ;)

Re:Dang!

[enigmals1]

HA HA HA! ...no.

;)

awesome

[cl0ne]

Why don't you just remove the it domain name from the url:

eg. the following:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/06/152 1206&tid=172&tid=109/ [slashdot.org]

becomes:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/06/152120 6&tid=172&tid=109/ [slashdot.org]

rock.

Re:awesome

[grub]

That's what the first commented out one does.

It "kinda" breaks things, though, as you won't be able to browse just the IT. section then. If that's not important just apply the first filter as well.

defuglify slashdot

[eoyount]

I use the "favelet" from this page http://www.electricstate.com/articles/defuglify-sl ashdot [electricstate.com]
and keep it in my bookmark bar. I just click it whenever I see an ugly color scheme, and it replaces *.slashdot.org with hireadesigner.slashdot.org, so that you see the default color scheme.

Why not use style sheets?

[Matt Perry]

Installing Privoxy just to fix the IT theme is a bit extreme, don't you think? Why not just use your user-specific style sheet in your browser. This will work in Mozilla 1.8a3 and above and any Firefox nightlies (not 1.0 though). Just put in in <profile>/chrome/userContent.css:

/* Fix colours on Slashdot IT theme */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://it.slashdot.org/) {
a:link {
color: #006666 !important;
}
TD[background*="slashcorner-it.gif"] {
background: url(http://images.slashdot.org/slc.gif) #006666 no-repeat !important;
}
TD[background*="slashbar-it.gif"] {
background-image: none !important;
}
TD[bgcolor*="898163"] {
background-color: #006666 !important;
}
}