Making Skeptiko (and other sites) look nice

I am so enamoured of a Firefox add-on called Color Transform (CT) that I want to share it with you. It can be downloaded to Firefox from here:

http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/color-transform/?src=search

Installing It doesn't require a restart of the browser, by the way.

When it's installed, you get a new icon on the address bar that looks like this:
upload_2014-5-30_15-31-57.png
When you click on the symbol, that inactivates CT temporarily, and the icon looks like this:
upload_2014-5-30_14-51-27.png
This is useful if you want to look at sites as they are without any transformation.

If you click on the down-arrow, a panel pops up that looks like this:
upload_2014-5-30_16-5-58.png
The little red button at top right, currently a full circle, means that the panel is pinned on top and won't disappear if you click outside it. You can click the button to toggle it back to unpinned so that it does disappear, in which case the button changes appearance, looking like a thumbtack (can't get a screenshot of it since the panel disappears if I try).

If you mouse-over the many buttons on the panel, they tell you what they do, and it took me quite a while to work out how to use them, but once you get the hang, it's pretty easy. I want to save you the trouble and tell you how to make it painless.

Look at the two rows of green buttons near the top of the panel. They might not look like that by default. If you click and toggle any one of them, their appearance changes a bit, usually to add or subtract a bit of red from them. Make sure that you get them to look like they do in the screenshot.

Next, look at the three rows of theme buttons. Each shows a colour on top and another colour on the bottom. The top symbolises text colour, and the bottom, background colour. If you click one of the theme buttons, the appearance of the web page you are looking at will change. Clicking any one button repeatedly will cycle through variations on the theme, and the thing to concentrate on is the colour of the background. For now, ignore the colour of other things, especially text, which might not be to your taste.

You can also adjust the hue, saturation and lightness/darkness of the shade using the four rows of buttons below the theme buttons. Once you have the background colour just right, you might well want to change just the text colour.

To do this, hold down the SHIFT button on your keyboard and you can use the four rows of buttons mentioned above to change the colour of the text only. I like mine to be all black, so I just use the LIGHTNESS: Decrease upload_2014-5-30_16-6-33.png button (all the buttons tell you what they're for on mouse-over).

My preferred scheme looks like this:

upload_2014-5-30_15-20-17.png

That said, you might like some other colour combination: whatever turns you on. Once you have things looking like you want them, click the SAVE button near top left: upload_2014-5-30_15-27-32.png Once you do that, the job's a good 'un and will be applied to any site you visit.

Enjoy! :)
 
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