Johns Blog

The recent OTN Forums update has been heavily blogged/Twittered/posted about already, so I’m not even going to touch that one.

However, one thing that a few people have focused on (pardon the pun) is that the update has changed the way that viewed threads are displayed in a very light grey colour, making them a bit hard to read, as shown in this screenshot.

One option is obviously to petition the folks at OTN to try and get the look and feel changed (personally I don’t find the grey colour too bad, but I can see how it could be a problem to some people). However, obviously the OTN folks are never going to be able to please everyone at the same time.

Fortunately there is a way to change the look and feel yourself, not only of the OTN site, but of any website. Now I’m not going to get into ‘Browser Wars’ here, but if you use Firefox it is pretty simple, since you can use tools like Stylish and Greasemonkey to custom sites. If you use IE then there are other plugins around you can use.

I use Stylish (actually I use Stylish *and* Greasemonkey but that’s another story) and once you have installed the plugin you can create new styles for any website you visit. For example if I create a new style for the OTN forums like this:

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://forums.oracle.com) {
a:visited {
color:#00007F !important;
text-decoration:underline !important;
}
}

Then the next time I visit the OTN Forum (actually immediately if you have stylish already enabled) then the visited links should be in a darker blue colour, like this:

Now I’m not saying this colour scheme is any nicer (in fact I think it’s a bit harder to read, but it does show how you can easily style any website yourself if you don’t like the design.

If you modify the layout, feel free to let me know and perhaps we can start a collection of OTN Forum skins?