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Google Reader is adding some new social features, and one of them is Likes. You can mark that you like a particular post that flows through Google Reader and see other users who have done the same. The Like notification appears in a prominent position directly under the headline:



There's no way to opt out of the feature and I found it distracting. To disable it, I used Stylish for Firefox. I chose "Write new style", then "for www.google.com", and I added the following lines (after some CSS investigation):

.entry-likers-n {display:none;}
.like-inactive {display:none;}

That removes both the Likes count and the button for marking something as liked. It's a lot like the MetaFilter favorites feature but it feels odd because there's little to no community interaction at Google Reader. I guess it might be neat to spot someone you happen to know in a liked-list, but what are the chances? (Showing just my contacts who liked something would be great.) Aggregate data might be fun to see, but I don't need the feature active unless I want to start Liking-posts-up to give them more attention on a list of popular posts somewhere. So until Google Reader liked-lists are more than just a list of random users who liked something, I'm going to mute it.

Last weekend we started selling t-shirts at MetaFilter and had the crazy idea that we'd ship them ourselves. Today we bagged, labeled, and dropped off a bunch of t-shirts at the post office. I took this video for posterity.

So the other day Jessamyn posted about her custom Gmail style: barely there email and I rushed in to create my own custom style. (You get there in Gmail via Settings -> Themes -> Choose your own colors.) My custom colors look like this:



Works great for me, but the one color you can't change via this form is the color of read messages. So I busted out Stylish for Firefox to finish my Gmail customization. If you'd like to control the color of read messages in Gmail, you can borrow my Stylish style if you'd like: Gmail Stylish Tweaks.

Just replace my color choices with yours and you'll be set. Oh, and I threw in removing the invitations box at no extra charge.