Greasemonkey Hacks

Hack #87. Squeeze More Feeds into the Bloglines Sidebar

Tweak Bloglines' style to see more subscriptions without scrolling.

Bloglines uses frames to provide a quick overview of your subscriptions, even as you're reading news. The name of each feed is displayed in bold when the feed contains new unread items. Unfortunately, the layout of the sidebar is space-inefficient, with a larger header and font, so you can see only a limited number of feeds without scrolling.

This user script removes the pretty but useless header from the sidebar and reduces the height of each feed link so that many more feeds are visible at the same time.

The Code

This user script runs on the Bloglines feed-reading page. It checks to make sure Bloglines is in reading mode; if it is in editing mode (for example, adding or reordering your subscriptions), the formatting of the sidebar is not changed.

The code itself is divided into four parts:

Modify font style

First, it sets the font style for the entire sidebar to a smaller size and reduces the interline spacing, so that more lines display in the same vertical space.

Change the header

Next, it hides the Bloglines logo and the tabs for adding and editing feeds. The links for adding and editing feeds are important, but they don't need to be displayed so prominently. Instead of removing them completely, the script moves them to the bottom of the frame, below the list of subscriptions.

Remove extra padding

To make the subscription list flush with the top of the browser window, ...