Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Silence Site Comments with Shutup.css

by Matthew Zuras on February 7, 2010 at 12:15 PM

Greetings to all of our devoted readers who steer clear of the comments section! We have a special gift in store for you today. We know that blog comments can frequently get out of hand, stray off-topic, or metastasize into book-length arguments between Internet polemicists. Sometimes you just want a mute button for all the garbage, and programmer Steven Frank has heard our plaintive cries. His shutup.css is a much-needed style sheet that will remove comments from your view, effectively decreasing load time and putting a stopper in the blogosphere chatterbox.

Thankfully, using it requires no prior knowledge of CSS -- but we'll give you some background anyway. Cascading Style Sheets basically tell your Web browser how to format bits of HTML, which are frequently organized by "IDs" and "classes." For example, if a Web designer wants to make every blog post title appear bright green in Helvetica Bold 24-point font, they can simply code that in a style sheet instead of individually augmenting every post title with HTML tags. Shutup.css looks for IDs called "comments" and simply tells your browser not to display them. This can, of course, interfere with some sites that name bits of source code as "comments" when they actually refer to something else, but Shutup should work for the majority of comment-enabled sites.

If you're running Safari, all you need to do is download the style sheet and activate it in the Advanced tab of your browser preferences. Frank has posted links for users running Firefox and Chrome. Thanks, Steven! [From: Steven Frank, via: DownloadSquad and: The Awl]

Tags: comments, css, dialogue, humor, steven frank, StevenFrank, top

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular