Making Myspace Look Less Crap

 Originally Posted as a bulletin over on Myspace

Warning: This bulletin contains material of a geekish nature,if you are not a geek or feel you may be offended by geekish/nerdish terms such as MySpace HTML Sucks or Tom is a retard when it comes to building functional web sites then please look away now…..

Better still why dont you sit in the corner, suck your thumb & dream how you wanna achieve one of the following:

A) Be just like Paris Hilton
B)(For the guys) how much you wanna screw Paris Hilton
C) How you wish you had the IQ of Paris

PS – In keeping with myspace bulletin tradition you must repost this to 15 Billion friends within the next 2 minutes or you will be cursed genital warts……;-)

PPS – Only kidding about the genital warts….but, shhhhhh don’t tell anyone

Okay “Geeks” read on….

My Redesign Here

Oh to add, please use a decent web browser (***Cough Firefox Cough***), that means not Internet Explorer…
I purposely avoided joining Myspace for over 4 years, partly because I could do without
my inbox filling up with requests from bimbo’s wanting me to view them naked – how kind.

The main reason, however, was that browsing the site was like a nightmare throwback to
the early 90′s & NO I am not talking about bad hair, Kris Kross (Tha Mack Daddy will make ya jump – Hmmm) & the Spice Girls.

MySpace was & still is any competent web developers nightmare, in fact I challenge anyone not to get frankly pissed with constant side scrolling, bad graphics & flashing
backgrounds as shown in the example below:
Let me hypnotise you with some crappy flashing graphics

If I joined Myspace I wanted my page to be half way decent, ie, no sideward scrolls,
flashing backgrounds or bad graphics, of course my friend CSS would be here to help.

Little did I know that in many ways myspace is as bad under the hood as it is visually.

I consider myself a semi-veteren of web design, but getting under the hood of myspace code will make you pull ya hair out, in fact the constant fighting to get a tight feel using
custom CSS almost made me give up.

Fortunatley, I found a decent tutorial Mike Industries who had previously suffered & conquered the beast of myspace.

Using his released SourceCode – download here as a base made the job a whole lot eaiser,
in fact it was someone of a pleasure to overcome myspace devil code.

As you will see my redesign it is not major surgery, I wanted the structure of myspace to remain the same, but it is a major improvement, both visually & under the hood.

If you want a consistent layout but want something visually different then I’d suggest
using one of the div overlays listed on mashable.com.

Mashable Linky

Particular props go to the following….

Derek Punsalan of 5thirtyone for this gem Classy Myspace

How he did it Here

Also the chappy who did This

How he did it available Here & Here 

Bear in mind though that some of these may be in violation of myspace rules, regarding overlaying ad’s & other crap they stuff on ya page.

I knocked up a version of my profile with each of these & if you know a little bit of html & css it will be a sinch.

EL – – Jay