Custom Opera buttons to make LJ more tolerable

[vakkotaur]

A while ago I wandered across a site with bookmarklets (snippets of allegedly useful javascript) for Opera. To my astonishment, one of them seemed to actually be useful. It could become a button on the "personal bar" and that button would append ?style=mine to the page URL and reload the page. This makes LJ much more readable as I can read pages in a color scheme that isn't deranged. This was so useful that I enabled javascript - though only for LJ.

The "personal bar" thing was a problem as I kept it off due to its taking up screen space for not much gain. Fortunately I could drag a copy of the useful button from that bar to the address bar. Unfortunately, that newly placed button only lasted a session. If I closed Opera and re-opened it, the nice new button was gone and I had to put it back. This got tiresome.

Last night I decided to Do Something About It and read up what I could about making proper Opera "power buttons" and managed to get a bit further, but still had the disappearing button problem. I asked on the Opera forums and after a false start got a surprising answer: the only thing I was doing wrong was having an equals sign in the button title. Evidently that prevents the new button from being permanently stored. A bug report has been filed.

If you use Opera and want this button, which someone else fixed, it's the LJ style:mine link on this page.

While I was looking up what I could, I found another staggeringly useful button. It toggles the "fit to width" option (which Opera has a strange name for: "medium screen rendering"). Horizontal scrolling is banished with a click. No more am I at the mercy of someone thoughtlessly posting a screen-widener of some sort. For that "Fit" button, look here.

Comments

screen widening

[yakko.livejournal.com]

After useless and unnecessary javascript, screen widening is the biggest pet peeve of mine. At least I somewhat-figured-out how to unbreak web pages I have control over (using <code> instead of <pre>, for instance)

I wonder if there're equivalent bookmarklets or addons for Firefox, for both ?style=mine and "un-widen the page" ... I'll have to look.

Re: screen widening

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this will be of much help, but this is the raw bookmarklet I first happened across:

javascript:location.search+=(location.search?'&':'?')+'style=mine'