Being Mr. Kenny

After trawling the web for ages and ages in search of a bookmarklet that allowed me to add a user stylesheet, I finally found one, and I’m blogging about it purely to help its Google pagerank, hence the funny link text.

Add user stylesheet make user stylesheet add user styles style sheet click button to apply user stylesheet css

It’s a brilliant utility which allows you to add your own styles to any webpage just by clicking a button. I use it to narrow websites that are far too wide to be easily read, like Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox entries (this is the very height of irony in my opinion).

To get the bookmarklet I generated, visit www.squarefree.com/userstyles/make-bookmarklet.html and type in “body { width: 700px !important; margin: auto !important; }” (without the quotes) and follow the instructions (I couldn’t get it to work in Opera, but it works in IE).

This fascinates and delights me.

Microsoft Team RSS Blog: “Icons: It’s still orange”

I’ve just come back from a mate’s house where I was hungry from the moment I arrived. It was really annoying! I ate all the nibbles that were provided (I was assured they needed to be eaten) and some nuts into the bargain.

Then I got home and fell upon the cheeses leftover from Christmas. There was loads: camembert, stilton, something with mustard in it, something with chives in it, dolcelatte (I finished that one) and applewood smoked cheddar.

Now I’m eating Darth Vader chocolate coins, which I’ve just remembered I had! They come in a Darth Vader money box, it’s the best, thank you Grandma!

Disclaimer for Ailis: Sorry, geek post again!

Mentioned these sites in a previous post a while ago:

• Jeffrey Zeldman: XHTML 2 and all that
• Mark Pilgrim: Semantic obsolescence — this one links to about a million more things to read

I have decided that the new stuff that XHTML 2 will bring will outweigh any negative side-effects (and at the moment I don’t see too many anyway). Still, the above sites are interesting reading if you want to see the other side of progress on the web.

I do think that XHTML 2 will be a bit more tricky to use — or at least it introduces a lot more functionality into XHTML that isn’t as easy as the more basic stuff. But I’m all for it!

(For those that haven’t had a glance at it yet, the new draft recommendation for XHTML 2.0 is available for reading: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/. Have a good poke around, it’s quite enlightening…)

Update: A list of all the XHTML 2.0 elements and their attributes can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-xhtml2-20050527/elements.html

My cousin came over yesterday for Boxing Day. He is 5, and has a wonderful ability for naming pets. He named his goldfish Tallulah, which was a stroke of genius, and outdid himself when naming the kitten he received for Christmas this year: Kitty-Pan. I think it sounds Japanese, it’s brilliant.

Been listening a lot recently to Joanna Newsom’s album, The Milk-Eyed Mender. I saw her live a few years ago in Leeds, in a funny little pub (where, co-incidentally, there was a member of the cast of Emmerdale amongst the audience) and she was captivating.

She plays all but two of the songs on the harp, which has to be one of the best instruments ever, and has a distinctive singing style (remember, I grew up listening to Björk, so my definition of “distinctive” is probably a little … distinctive itself).

Plus she writes excellent lyrics. To me they read like poetry.

The Book of Right-on

I killed my dinner with karate —
kick ‘em in the face, taste the body;
shallow work is the work that I do.

Inflammatory Writ

Oh, where is your inflammatory writ?
Your text that would incite a light, “Be lit”?
Our music deserving devotion unswerving —
Cry “Do I deserve her?” with unflagging fervour,
(Well, no you do not, if you cannot get over it)

“En Gallop”

This place is damp and ghostly
I am already gone.
And the halls were lined
with the disembodied and dustly wings,
which fell from flesh gasplessly.

Gasplessly — genius!

Lina Hansson, who makes lovely websites, has made a spectacular one about Joanna: milky moon. It’s delightful.

This morning a computer monitor fell out of the attic. No one was hurt, but it was quite funny.