Over at Daring Fireball John Gruber has taken the notion of user specific settings and has “created a preferences page”:http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/preferences for his site. John isn’t using the standard style-switcher approach as outlined in Daniel Ludwin’s “A Backward Compatible Style Switcher” for “A List Apart”:http://www.alistapart.com/, and has instead opted for a an on-the-fly generated style-sheet, but the end result is the same. Daring Fireball allows the user to not only change the font size, but also to toggle the visibility of referrers. “Simple Bits”:http://www.simplebits.com/ uses an approach similar to Daniel Ludwin’s to change the colour scheme of the site, this time using three simple toolbar icons.

I have often worried about all the things I could do with this site, but have wanted to avoid visual bloat. It’s for this reason that I’ve avoiding putting ‘edit’ links next to my posts as a convenience for myself, and why the ‘Related Entries’ only get displayed on the individual entry pages. Now I’ve seen Daring Fireball’s admittedly simple options in action it has inspired me to have a play around with user specific preferences – expect a user configurable magpiebrain soon.