Styled to a Pulp

Khoi

20 years ago

Because it’s exceedingly easy to do so, because I like to tweak and tinker, and because I am procrastinating from various other design-related tasks today, I spent a bit of time this afternoon creating my own style sheet for Freshly Squeezed Software’s mixed-bag RSS aggregator (and the one that’s become my regular RSS client), Pulp Fiction. It’s called “Subtraction” and, as the name implies, it’s designed to look something like Subtraction.com. You can download it here for the cost of absolutely zero, but it’s also presented absolutely as is, with no warranties of any kind.

How to Get Style

After you’ve downloaded it, decompress the StuffIt archive, and copy the file “Subtraction.html” to this location: ~/Library/Application Support/PulpFiction/Stylesheets/, where tilde (~) is your Mac OS X home folder.

Below: How to dress like this site. The PulpFiction style sheet Subtraction in action.

I’ve tested this style sheet with the forty-odd feeds to which I subscribe and they basically all work pretty okay with it. It’s the ones that include images that will appear the least orderly — or the monst wonky — but that will be true with any of the style sheets included with PulpFiction or the others that you can download for it.

What It’s Good For

The real benefit of this style sheet, of course, is the special CSS rules that I included that will render Subtraction.com’s RSS feed with finesse. This means the thumbnails that I often include in the first paragraph of each post, the illustrative images, and the captions that accompany them will all render more or less in a manner that reflects my original intent.

I figure that the audience for this has to satisfy a few criteria: first, they have to be more than just mildly interested in what I have to say here. Second, they have to be users of PulpFiction. And third, they must possess the technical savvy and free time enough to bother to install the damn thing. So, all three of you, please write me back and let me know how it works.