So, I guess it’s kind of appropriate that my first real post on this blog would be about my first real program-type-thing, which was sent out into the world earlier today. It’s not really a program; it’s a snippet of javascript and a bunch of CSS that allows users of Instapaper to use a different stylesheet, namely the one I made, which gives it a more newsy kind of look.

I love Instapaper. I don’t use that many applications, really, but I use Instapaper all the time. This might be because I like to read news articles and certain blog posts pretty much every day, and many news sites are designed so you are assaulted visually while trying to simply read one of the articles on the site. Instapaper is an application that lets you tag articles or web pages to “read later.” Those articles get collected at your Instapaper account page, and you can go there whenever you want and read just the article – not all the crap and flash and ads and poor layout or whatever it is about the original site in question that bothered you.

For instance, I read Glenn Greenwald all the time, pretty much every day. But Salon.com has pop-up ads and a kind of weird design that makes me a bit insane. So with Instapaper, I save the article for later and read it without all the clutter. It’s perfect for just this type of situation.

But, me being me, I was always a little bothered at how much whitespace there was in the default Instapaper single article page. It felt like something could be done to make it more official-like, make the content look more like a news article. (Why I’m obsessed with making things look like news articles, I do not know.) So I figured I’d take a shot at making a user script for Firefox that includes a stylesheet for Instapaper that I would like, and that I would use myself. (Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that lets you load javascript files called user scripts to affect the performance or look of items on the web. For example, there are several user scripts that take the ads out of Gmail, so you won’t see them when you log in anymore. You have to install Greasemonkey to load and run the scripts, but it’s not hard to do. And anyone can make a user script. There are hundreds upon hundreds are available at userscripts.org to study and get ideas from.)

I called my user script Instapaper Times, and I think it came out all right. Below is an example of an article saved to Instapaper and utilizing the Instapaper Times script:

Mind you, this is my first user script, or any script, of any kind. So it’s definitely a work in progress. I’m sure there will be changes. I’m already thinking the text should be larger on the article page. But we’ll see what happens with it. Hopefully, other people will like it and use it, too. You can find it here, at the Greasemonkey site. Let me know what you think.