I find sites like Daring Fireball impossible to read. I’m not sure what it is, but the dark background makes my eyes go blurry. My issue is certainly not just limited to that one site either—dark background-ed sites are all over.

I’d been wishing there was some way to remedy this for a long time now, and while Readability got us half-way, it isn’t perfect for this purpose. It works extremely well on individual articles, but what if you wanted to invert the look of a homepage or a forum or anything else non-article?

Now you can. With Snowball.

It doesn’t work on every site, but I’m adding new rules all the time. If it doesn’t work for your favourite site just let me know and I’ll see if I can make it work.

Behind the scenes

On the technical site of things, Snowball is a simple Javascript plugin. The code is really divided into two parts: a fetcher and a set of jQuery CSS overrides. The fetcher (the actual bookmark) fetches jQuery and your magic external jQuery file containing the CSS fixes. The only hard part is Javascript required to fetch the two files—the rest is just basic jQuery. You can see it all over at Github.