Brent P. Newhall's Blog

Want a blog, but don’t want to spend time building a blog? Do you have an email address? Then you’ve got a blog, thanks to Posterous.

Just send an email, containing whatever you want on your blog, to post@posterous.com. They’ll automatically create a blog, and reply with your new blog’s address. Then just continue emailing post@posterous.com with new messages. The email that they send to you will also contain a link letting you set up an account, so you can edit and delete posts, change your site’s name, etc.

You can attach mp3s, videos, and links to your post and it’ll all show up on your blog. Note that it all shows up, including your signature, so you may want to delete that before sending.

Here’s my blog, as an example. Nice, clean, and simple.

I really love this site: Topix. It displays local news stories for your specific town or county, along with forum comments. All the comments are from people local to the story, so you’ll see reactions from the parents or neighbors of those involved. You get really close to what happens.

Warning! Extreme geekiness ahead, but at least it’s extremely useful geekiness.

Are you annoyed with the text size on certain websites? Would you like to increase the text size on just those sites? Do you use the Firefox web browser?

If you’re using Firefox, find the “chrome” directory in your preferences (location varies by operating system). Create a file named userContent.css in the chrome directory, and add this to it:

@-moz-document domain(website.com)

{

body { font-size: 16pt; }

}

Replace “website.com” with the address of the site you want to affect. Then restart Firefox. You can add more entries like the one above for other websites.

If you’re using Internet Explorer, unfortunately, I don’t know of a way of changing the default font size for one website. You can change it for all websites, though.

Use Notepad to create a text file named userContent.css somewhere on your computer, and add the following to it:

body { font-size: 16pt; }

Then, in Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options, then select General, then Accessibility. Select the “Ignore colors”, “Ignore font styles”, and “Ignore font sizes” checkboxes. Under User Style Sheet, select “Format documents using my style sheet”, click Browse, and navigate to userContent.css and select it.

Some websites lock their content down, so this trick won’t work on every website. To get it working on specific websites, you’d need to look at their CSS (View > Source) and see which visual elements are used on the webpage.

But this should work on many websites. If it doesn’t work on your favorite website, let me know and I should be able to find the offending CSS and offer a specific modification.