User stylesheets are pretty cool. All modern browsers have extensions for supporting user stylesheets for specific domains. If a website is coded well, it is pretty easy to completely change the look and feel of a website with a few CSS overrides.

Georgia Tech professors and students all agree that T-Square is awful. On campus, the site is infamous for its unreliability and horrid user interface. After one of my 2110 labs I played around with the site a little with WebKit’s web inspector tool. From there I decided to make a full user stylesheet.

I really like the end result. I made a lot of aesthetic improvements to the site, mostly by just using CSS3 rules instead of crummy images. I also made some tweaks that makes the site a bit more usable in certain situations. Say, for example that you have a really small window:

The class tabs run off the screen. Compare that to the screenshot above.

The majority of the changes I made to the site used CSS3 styles, including:

• changing the class tabs to buttons (buttons are better because they can be wrapped without looking strange)
• changing the sidebar navigation bar to buttons
• applying an even-odd background style to tables.
• cleaning up and emphasizing buttons and errors/information messages

Other changes I made include:

• fixing some of the iframes to not show horizontal scrollbars when not needed
• changing the font to Helvetica from MS Trebuchet
• removing unnecessary images and font transformations

It’s pretty amazing what you can do with CSS3 today. I also couldn’t have done this without the WebKit Inspector. I can’t imaging having to figure out why certain CSS rules weren’t being overridden or figuring out which class or ID to restyle without the WebKit Inspector. It’s really awesome. I do wish there was a native IDE for web development like this. (Are you listening, Panic?)

If you’re a Techie who uses T-Square, I suggest you give my “Refined T-Square” stylesheet a try. It’s available on Stylebot.me. Here are some simple instructions for installation for each browser:

• Chrome: install the Stylebot extension and click “Install”
• Firefox: install Greasemonkey and click “Userscript”
• Safari: install the User CSS extension. Click “View CSS” and copy/paste into a new User CSS with URL include “https://t-square.gatech.edu/*”

This summer I started working for the Technique, Georgia Tech’s student newspaper. I was hired to lead new efforts to redesign and add new features to the newspaper’s online counterpart, Nique.net. The Technique staff contacted me off of a referral from my freshman CS mentor Brad Williford. (By the way, the CS mentor program at Georgia Tech is awesome. It really helps form a solid, friendly community in the College of Computing between the freshman and upperclassmen.)

Working for the Technique has been a great experience, so far. The Technique staff is very friendly – everyone is positive and hard-working. They have their act together. I was a bit unsure if I could offer everything that they were looking in a web developer, but I was assured that they were looking for someone who could make mistakes and learn on the job. Fortunately I haven’t made any big mistakes so far, but I sure have learned a lot.

One thing about working for the Technique is that it is my first experience doing web development work as an employee and not freelance. I’ve had to learn how to handle issues appropriately within the organization. I’ve gained a lot of experience on simply how to collaborate and work as a team, because usually with other work I had to make all of the decisions.

Another large component of my learning experience with the Technique has been becoming more familiar with PHP and Javascript. I’ve had to deal with PHP and Javascript before, but with Nique.net I can no longer get away with just hacking together some flimsy code. I’ve advanced my knowledge of PHP a lot more and I feel a lot more comfortable using it in other projects. I’ve also become a lot more familiar with the back-end of WordPress, especially regarding queries and themes.

The Technique wants to develop the Nique.net website iteratively, pushing out new updates every few weeks. We’re planning on pushing our first release soon, and it is going to be a big one. I’ve added a lot of new components to the site that makes it more customized and less blog-like. The paper edition has always had special sections that are specialized tidbits. For example, in the paper there’s a section called “Hot-or-Not,” which has four separate paragraphs for four topics that are either positive or negative. In the paper, this section has always been laid out in a nice grid-like fashion with a little sun icon for the positive topics and a snowflake for the negative topics. However, on Nique.net, this section has always been just pushed out as a simple WordPress post with no formatting. This is changing in the new version of Nique.net, which will be released soon.

My goal for working for the Technique is to bring Nique.net up to a good standard that makes it a viable alternative to the paper edition. The Technique hasn’t had a student web developer for several years (if ever), and they are hoping that I can make some changes to make the website more popular.

As a Georgia Tech student, I’ve always preferred the paper edition over Nique.net. The website just doesn’t bring the same feeling that the paper has, simply because it isn’t formatted and customized like the paper is. It just shows that the past Technique staff just has not put enough effort into the online edition. The current Technique News Editor, Vijai Narayanan, wants to change that. While Vijai and I agree that Nique.net will not become the primary method for readers to read Technique content anytime soon, I’m hoping we can at least make it a viable alternative so that at least I would want to read it online.

I want Nique.net to be a leader for online college publications. With the new version coming soon, it will be our first step towards that goal.