Saving custom HTML locally on live sites without FTP access? - php

Question

We all know that Firebug / Web Developer Toolbar, etc. can change the HTML/CSS of any page to our local machines. Upon refreshing, however, we know these changes are not saved.
How does someone save these changes for just our local machine, in an automatic fashion that would have our changes reappear after refreshing the site?
For example, say I go to a blog posting website, which is updated by someone every day. Say I wanted to color the background of every blog's title I've read a bright annoying red, (so quick viewing in the future would allow me to skip over these). In this case, imagine the title is always an h2 element. I would add an inline element to this heading, so:
<h2>The world ends this year!</h2>
becomes
<h2 style="color:red;">The world ends this year!</h2>
Is there any way to Mark, Highlight, or change this blog post title on just our local machine for automatic viewing in the future?

Answer 1

If you're aiming to personalize your own web experience I recommend a Greasemonkey script
that applies CSS programmatically. There is an equivalent plugin called Stylish which is the analog of GM for CSS. There are equivalents for Chrome.
If you're aiming to provide this functionality to users of a website you're creating, I'd look into storing personalized styling on the client-side using HTML5 DOM Storage.

Answer 2

You don't need any plugin or program to do that, just create the userContent.css file in your Firefox profile directory, and paste your custom CSS for the webpage you want, like:
#-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.domain.com/blog/) {
#content h2 {
color:red !important;
}
#content h2 a {
color:red !important;
}
}
you can find more customizable technique on the mozilla developer site

Answer 3

I'm sure there are browser plugins to do something like this - especially for Firefox, etc. (If not, it wouldn't be too complicated to create one.)
Otherwise, I'd investigate Greasemonkey, and write some custom user scripts to do just this. You could have the custom user script apply to all sites, and use a local data store to determine if the site has been previously visited or not.
Ideally, instead of duplicating the history store (since your web browser is already storing history), such a plugin would integrate with the browser history. However, this may not be desirable if you have your browser history configured to only save the most recent # of days, and if you want this listing of "read" posts to be maintained longer-term.