My personal itch to scratch just recently has been the umpteen formatting foibles of HackerNews. So, in the spirit of making the web more personal again, I knocked up a TamperMonkey userscript to fix up the worst of my personal bugbears.
This isn't an attempt at a complete rebrand/redesign of the site, instead it's just fixing up what I think are the biggest design/readability issues whilst trying to remain true to the site's existing aesthetic.
Key features:
* Base font size increased
* A little more room around headings
* Top menu bar is full-width and with a little more padding
* Downvoted comments no longer faint hard-to-read grey. Instead they're rendered with a light gray background and in a smaller font size.
* Comments have a more readable max line length
* Quotes are parsed and transformed to look like genuine quotes. I.e. any p or span that starts with '>' is transformed and rendered with a light orange background and in italics.
* The 'Add comment' box on items is hidden by default. (Surely you'd want to read all the comments first before leaping in with your own 2p's worth!?)
Show HN: I built a Hacker News userscript to make this site more legible
github.com