grep jason_
omg.lol

Making A Userscript For Micro.blog

One thing I absolutely love about the web is the fact that if you are viewing a webpage you can see all the code that makes up that page with a few simple clicks. This is great if you are trying to debug something, are curious how a feature was implemented, or even if you want to change the appearance of something. Clean, simple, and useful!

I use a social blogging service called Micro.blog every single day, throughout the day. When using an iPhone or iPad, I generally use the third party app, Gluon. When I am on a Mac I tend to use the web version of Micro.blog. I like the functionality of the web version, but find the stark white appearance to be a little much on my eyes toward the night hours. As I said above, because it's the web, it's pretty trivial to make changes to the appearance of the page that is displaying on my screen, so I did just that. A couple days ago I started playing around with different color schemes that were a darker palette, to see if I could land on something that still looked clean and nice, but achieved the goal of being less bright.

I started off by hacking different parts of the css all within the browser inspector, and then moved to creating something a little bit more permanent after I started getting to something that felt good. Because I wanted this custom palette to automatically load every time I visited Micro.blog, I created a userscript that can be used with various browser plugins. This means I can use the style on all my computers, and when I make an update to the userscript, it will update on each machine when it checks for updates to the styles.

For simple userscript management I am using the browser add-on Tampermonkey.

UPDATE I started the updates to account for Micro.blog 2.0. There is an initial version out that fixes most of the majorly broken stuff. If you check for updates in Tampermonkey it should pull it automatically.

If you want to use my userscript for Micro.blog to try it out or tweak yourself, you can find it here!

Keep in mind it's not done yet, so there are some rough edges to be worked out in further revisions!

Github Changelog

Using userscript in dark

Here are a couple screenshots of what it looks like at version 2020.05.17.1

Micro.blog userscript example screenshot

Micro.blog userscript example screenshot