MySpace Blog “Customization”

MySpace, a place for friends, is once again the bane of my existence. I’m going to try to stop making every other entry about my other blog, because I’m honestly not trying to pimp it here (if I was, there’d be endless links on the sidebar), but this is where I go to vent, and I need to vent right about now.

I spent most of the evening fighting to the death with MySpace’s “blog customization” panel. Until recently, the profile part of MySpace had no options for customization — it was only through “third-party” hacking that people were able to override MySpace’s bland, unattractive default settings. However, for as long as I’ve used it (since late 2005), the blog has had customization options: a list of options to specify font, size, color, alignment, with a little textarea at the bottom to paste in your own CSS code.

I had a new idea for the MySpace blog. Because, see, I have the other blog, but then I want to update the MySpace blog, as well, because — among other things — MySpace has implemented goofy status feeds (not unlike Facebook) that will tell MySpace users when I’ve posted a new blog. However, I’m lazy, and even as “customizable” as a MySpace blog can get, it’s still pretty fucking ugly. Besides which, I can’t pimp the site that way. So I figured the smartest thing to do would be to imitate the way the main page of the real blog is right now — the entry excerpt, followed by a link to the full blog post, which will take them to the site. It seemed like such an easy task.

My first plan had virtually nothing to do with CSS or anything. It seems like the most logical thing in the world for me to use MySpace as an syndicator for my blog. I post once, MovableType generates a special feed, pings MySpace, then MySpace posts it. That’d work really well if MySpace was set up that way! It’s…not. Not even close. If you’re asking why I, in my quest to ease laziness, don’t use MySpace’s RSS feed and syndicate that on my MovableType blog (which has the technology), the answer is simple: MySpace sucks ass. In the same way it can’t syndicate, it can’t utilize certain MovableType features that I want.

So I spent far too long working up a custom stylesheet. It shouldn’t have been difficult: specify the text, the link colors, the custom header/footer sizes/alignments that I use — so damn easy, right? Wrong.

Here’s how MySpace would work in a perfect world: you paste something — anything — into the CSS textarea, and it removes MySpace’s default CSS code. If you fuck everything up and it’s a total disaster, just delete your stylesheet and the old stuff comes back. Seems reasonable, right?! A little hot if->else action, and we know how much MySpace loves overscripting every little thing — they can’t lose.

Well, they don’t do it that way. You have to override every single fucking thing on their CSS, or else it gets confused. Even then, it gets a little hairy. All I wanted to specify for the links were colors; MySpace lists font-size. Why?! I have variable font-sizes, so the problem I ran into initially is that the colors worked fine, but every link — no matter what other specifications were there — appeared with the same font-size. I’m not an expert on web design, as anyone who has visited one of my many sites will attest, so I don’t know of any magical CSS command that will specify to override a set-in-stone font-size with a variable. I am pretty sure h3, it does nothing but the browser default. you type it in as its own p class, and it works fine. What the fuck?