Downloader: Remove comments from your web experience with shutup.css

Monday, March 1, 2010

Remove comments from your web experience with shutup.css

Filed under: Blogging, Productivity, Browser Tips

I have a love/hate with blog comments... I love to hate them. (ba-dum tssss -- I'm here all week, folks. Don't forget to tip your waitress (Seb)) No, but seriously, there are times when the comment area of an otherwise useful blog post gets filled up with bluster and vitriol instead of helpful supportive comments. While I don't mind healthy debate, sometimes things get out of control, like they did recently at Engadget.

Depending on the sites you frequent, comments can be useful, benign, or downright negative. If you don't find that you get a lot of value out of comments, why not turn them off? I don't mean turn them off for your own site, though you could do that too, I mean turn them off web-wide.

That must have been the thought process Steven Frank went through when he put together shutup.css, a style sheet that will suppress comments from most sites. It works by hiding blocks with IDs like "comments", which you should be aware could affect some sites in ways you might not expect. But if you'd like to have a comment-less experience while browsing Engadget even now that they've turned comments back on, shutup.css might just be the ticket.

The file can be applied as a custom stylesheet in Safari, and the post links to solutions for both Firefox and Chrome.