Plaintext AskMe and MeTa

March 20, 2005 12:52 PM

There's also a plain-text theme for metafilter, with a white background.
posted by mathowie at 12:26 PM PST on March 20

I've always wanted to ask this question, how do I get the nifty white background in Metatalk and Ask Metafilter? The white background theme seems only to work on the main page. Am I missing something? Thanks!
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket to MetaFilter-Related at 12:52 PM (15 comments total)

I think the lofi look is only for the Blue right now. Once the redesign gets implemented, I suppose there'll be consistency.
posted by Gyan at 1:04 PM on March 20, 2005

I don't think that's a feature of MeTa or AskMe. You can roll your own, though, with URIid, a firefox extension that lets you us a custom stylesheet with any webpage. Here are some examples, with new stylesheets for del.icio.us and gmail. You can probably do the same with greasemonkey.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 1:06 PM on March 20, 2005

Go download Opera and familiarize yourself with the Ctrl-G key combo.
posted by Space Coyote at 1:57 PM on March 20, 2005

it's not available for the other sites. You could also play with user CSS hacks in firefox to get a plain layout.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:19 PM on March 20, 2005

Hmmm. Sometimes for me the front page changes from blue to white and back again. Usually white at work and blue at home. Cookie monsters? And no, I never log out.
posted by bdave at 3:45 PM on March 20, 2005

For the same basic effect in Firefox: View > Page Style > No Page Style.
posted by smackfu at 5:46 PM on March 20, 2005

There's always Lynx.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 6:03 PM on March 20, 2005

or the Zap Colors bookmarklet which also cleans things up on a per-page basis. Drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar, and then just click to restore visibility (but so irritating not to be able to set plain for Ask in Customize)
posted by anadem at 6:12 PM on March 20, 2005

"There's also a plain-text theme for metafilter, with a white background." -- great! but how to apply a theme, please? searched the docs but didn't find info ...
posted by anadem at 6:13 PM on March 20, 2005

I asked mathowie for a plain white option for Metatalk a year or 2 ago, with no joy. Ah well.

anadem, look on your 'customize' page. Kinda obvious, I'd think. There is an option there, in a drop-down.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:46 PM on March 20, 2005

What about those people whom I used to laugh at and tell to stop reading the site at work? You know the ones - locked-down computer, IE only available, no way to install anything better.

You see, while I use to laugh at them, now I are one :-(
posted by dg at 7:26 PM on March 20, 2005

Wait. You worked with people who read MetaFilter at work? And they didn't ask you "so - are you the dg?"
posted by yhbc at 7:31 PM on March 20, 2005

Curiously, the white theme lacks the new "Ask Metafilter" link in the set of links at the top of the page, though it does have it at the bottom. This suggests to me that it's not so much a theme as a program variant.
posted by George_Spiggott at 7:34 PM on March 20, 2005

No, yhbc - I used to laugh at people who were stuck reading MeFi at work on crippled PCs. For the first time, I do not have the ability to install software or change any damned thing on my work PC and I now see how much that sucks. Somehow, it seemed funnier when it was happening to other people.

Besides, dg is my secret identity, not one that I use in the real world.
posted by dg at 8:22 PM on March 20, 2005

Good catch, George_S... I've been meaning to mention that for a while but didn't think it deserved its own MeTa thread.
posted by Doohickie at 5:41 AM on March 21, 2005