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Stephen Pickering

Tag: MySpace

  • How to Make a Transparent Myspace Page

    Update 11/7/09* OK, it will halfway work, or 4/5ths work in 2.0 if you go into Customize Profile, select “No Theme” and then add the code below into the CSS box. But the damn thing is, you have to manually enter it. Won’t let you copy and paste, at least not on my Mac. And then you hit publish and it will say, “You have some custom CSS in your Advanced Edit that may not look right with this theme. Remove the custom CSS?” And you say no, keep the Custom CSS. Then when you publish the majority of your page will be transparent, but that big blue Myspace header is still there. I don’t know how to get rid of that. You can check out my page here: http://myspace.com/stephenkp and my music page which is still on 1.o here: http://myspace.com/stephenpickering

    Update 11/7/09*If you haven’t guessed already or wanted to throw rocks at me in the parking lot, this code only works on Myspace 1.0. I just started playing around with Myspace 2.0 today and it doesn’t accept CSS code in the various info boxes that 1.0 did. From my brief playing around, I’ve found that you can sort of kinda do it by putting the URL of your image in the all of the places under “Advanced Edit” or you can import an image if you right click the URL box (Control+Click on a Mac) but I can’t seem to get rid of the massive blue Myspace banner up top, unless I choose the “Snoop Dog” theme, but in which case it lowers my photo and info bar too much. The whole thing doesn’t look as clean either as each “module” and “content” breaks off the continuity of the image. I have a solid red image that’s tiled. I can imagine if you had a photograph, as I once did of my dog, it would be a complete disaster. So the only option I can see is to roll back to 1.0 if you can (it allows me to). I don’t know what the solution is. Do you? Any ideas? And that damn myspace won’t let you cut and paste code into their Customize pane. I noticed there is a CSS box at the bottom of it, so I had to manually enter my code into that (tedious) hoping it would work, but it didn’t. When you save it, it keeps taking out the <> around the <style> tag and adding some gibberish to it. Maybe it would work if myspace didn’t mess up the code like that. I’ll keep looking. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear from you.

    So, you want to know how to make  your myspace page transparent? I started this blog just as a tool for myself, just to post various things that interested me, so that I wouldn’t forget them, but now its like “Man, I gotta post something everyday!” Funny how the ideas quit pouring in, serendipitously, when your attitude changes. Oh well, for the most part it’s fun. So I was fooling around on my Myspace page and wondering how to make a transparent background on it to make it look cooler, to make me look cooler.


    Below is the CSS code to make your Myspace page transparent. It’s pretty cool actually, but it would be nice to learn CSS completely so that I wouldn’t have to always be looking things up, and so that I could use Cascading Style Sheets to make even more custom changes to this and other pages of mine. Below is my Myspace page where I chose a background of a photo that I took of my dog. But you can put any image you want as your background, and still, for the most part, see all the foreground navigational links and boxes, or if you so choose you can make everything transparent on your myspace page.


    I wish I could take credit for this, but I can’t. I got it from: this blog.
    Go there and you can get the exact instructions (they’re easy) and code that you can copy and pace into your myspace. He’s also got some code there to make the boxes opaque. This is a lot of fun, and looks cool too. It’ll impress your friends, and you’ll really have street cred.
    I guess I better reprint his post here in case the link ever goes dead:

    For making your myspace profiles – If you dont pimp your profile, you are nobody. People wont respect you in the community. For making cool backgrounds, and your boxes (tables) transparent or moderately opaque, here are some tools I made today.
    They are all clean now. if you do a search for these things normally, they will always try to enter in their own ads into your myspace page. dont be violated. I havent sold out yet – so here is some very clean code for pimping your myspace. Be Safe.

    For: transparent boxes – custom background image
     <STYLE>
     td, table, tr, span, li, p, div, textarea, DIV
     {
     background-color: transparent;
     }
     body
     {
     background-image: url(http://XXXXXXXXXX);
     background-repeat: repeat;
     }
     </STYLE>

    opaque boxes and a background image>>>>

    insert the following inside your style brackets… (What are Style Brackets?)

    td.text td.text a img {width:50px !important;}
    table, td, textarea, a, body, input{background-color:transparent;border:none;border-width:0}
    table table table {border:10px double; border-color: 000000; padding:1; background-color:FFFFFF; filter:alpha(opacity=95); -moz-opacity:0.7; opacity:0.90; -khtml-opacity:0.4;}
    table table{border:0px}
    table table table table{border:0px}
    body {
    background-image:url(http:/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX);
    }

    you can play with the highlighted line to get the degrees how you want it. be careful! you may lose visibility altogether, and then you will have to navigate solely using your instruments.

    *Note: This Article was orginally written on February 28, 2008 on another blog, so my Myspace page looks a little different now. It’s still transparent, but with a tiled solid red background.

  • Advice to Myspace: Open Up Immediately

    #1 When I take a photo with my phone and beam it to Flickr it needs to push it to my Myspace Library, my Facebook library and every other of my social media places (It already pushes it to my blog and tweets it via FriendFeed.) And this needs to work in reverse also. If I post a picture to Myspace it needs to push it out to Facebook, tweet it, to my Flickr library, my blog, everywhere I have a Social media presence.

    #2 If I write a blog post, it needs to automatically post it to my Myspace Blog. If I write a Blog Post inside of Myspace it needs to push it to my regular blog, tweet it and send it to the Facebook stream.

    #3 When someone messages me, sends a friend request, makes a comment it needs to notify all my other places, including an SMS to my cell phone. Of course this has to be granular so you don’t get SMS’s all the time, but that’s a no brainer. Likewise I need to be able to return messages, comments, make friend requests, approve them etc. from my phone and every other place on the web or network. Let’s say I meet someone at a party and they have a myspace page too. I should be able to add them right there on the spot from my phone. Lets say I’m a musician playing a club. Everyone in the audience should be able to add me from their phones and I can auto add them back right there from my guitar. If I’m broadcasting that show on Kyte or Qik people should be able to tune into my Myspace page to see it. For that matter all these video services need to talk to each other. If I make a video of that show on Qik or Kyte it needs to automatically progagate to Youtube, Myspace, My blog, tweet it out and notify my Myspace friends.

    All these services must communicate and work together to survive, even eventually Facebook. The Social Web demands it. Web 2.0 vendors are not competing with the other vendors in their “space.” They are competing with themselves to enhance their particular strengths and shed themselves of their weaknesses. Starve the living daylights out of your weaknesses. Feed your opportunities. Peter Drucker says, “Don’t solve problems, seek opportunity.” The opportunity for social web companies is to earn people’s trust by being completely open in every possible way to the other companies that do certain things better. These companies will return the favor by opening up to the particular strengths Myspace and others can offer its users.

    You are not competing for users. You are competing with yourself for trust from society. They are not “users” they are your partners.

    Myspace has a particular advantage over Facebook in powncing on this opportunity and opening up completely and immediately. Their users don’t have the privacy expectations that Facebook’s users have. As a matter of fact their users don’t have any expectations of Myspace because, in actuality, they have no users. There are a bunch of accounts, but no one’s using them. But they could turn that on a dime by making these changes and become very relevant and vivacious again.

    The goal is not to conquer the World. The goal is to interact with the World in a useful way, to be a part of the World’s community, offering the World your particular creative strengths, point of view, and services. In that way you add spice to the World’s personality and more importantly value, so that every facet of society benefits from the Communications Revolution, growing and contributing to a higher standard of living for all. From such noble efforts Golden Ages are born.

    Right now our Society, which is now the World, is in a Wasteland mentality. “The center cannot hold” as Yeats said. This was exactly the situation the World was in, in the 11th century, the Dark Ages. It’s time for a new Renaissance. The only catalysts for this are the Microelectronics Revolution which began in the late 60’s and the Communications Revolution which began in the 90’s. They are the unstoppable bullet. Inertia is the impenetrable wall. What will happen when they meet? The battle is not over a platform. The platform is the infinite bandwidth of the fiber optic network. Each hair’s width glass fiber is capable of carrying an infinite number of colors of light, each color of light an infinite amount of information at light speed.

    There is no battle anymore. In its place there is an opportunity to be a trusted steward, a trusted guide for the social graph to the unlimited Cornucopia that the Universe has always had and that technology is opening the door to, at en ever increasing rate. “Listen to the Technology,” the great Carver Mead says. “What is it telling you?”

    Open.

    (thanks to @techcrunch for digging and for writing a better headline as
professional journalists, successful ones like them, can probably do in
their sleep. My original headline was("Myspace's Solution is So Simple")

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