Sage is an extension for Mozilla Firefox, that helps one read subscribed RSS and Atom feeds. It keeps track of read/unread feeds and seamlessly integrates within the browser as a RSS client. The good thing about Sage is that it has a very easy to customize CSS enabled front end. So the CSS file can be changed to suit one’s own aesthetic needs. The default theme is pretty good actually. But one always likes to turn around available knobs, even though one might be comfortable with things as they are. So is the nature of a restless mind, like that of mine.
I managed to script together a theme and it’s called Quick Silver. Nah nothing extraordinary about it. Just the colours go with silver, and there this is a nifty hover thing, which accounts for the ‘quick’ part of the name. Yeah so this is based on the rather innocuous yet powerful attributes of overflow and visibility in CSS. The theme just displays the titles of various feeds, and when hovered over, expands to display the description. All this in just CSS! To those who are conversant in CSS it might sound trivial. But until a few years ago, I would have thought that javascript would have been the ONLY way to do something like that. Times they are a changin’, so hums Bob ‘Great’ Dylan.
This is a screenshot of the stylesheet. And if you want to test the stylesheet, here is what you have to do. Right click on this link, and select Save Links as… Save it with an appropriate name. Fire up Sage inside Firefox (Tools > Sage). Click on Options on the right top corner of the Sage frame. Select Settings. Check Use Custom Style Sheet and browse to the file you just saved. Enjoy the Quick Silver! It would be highly recommended that you edit the file to choose the colors and numbers as you find fit.
