A chrome extension that lets you set a custom background image and colour for web twitter. A nostalgic throwback to when the homepage wasn’t a sea of searing white.

Chrome

Download from the Web Store

Firefox

Download from the Mozilla Add-ons repository

Installation

Install from the site listed above and open the options for the extension. You can then upload an image and specify a colour.

You can currently:

• Upload a custom image
• Set a custom background colour
• Specify whether the image tiles or not
• Specify whether the image stretches to cover the page or not.

If you have any feature requests or ideas for improvement, please open an issue!

Note: This is a purely local change. Other users cannot see the background you set, I’m afraid - this is only to re-implement homepage customisation that twitter has removed.

How it Works

The extension works by inserting a new CSS rule on the body of a twitter page based on the settings you choose. When you ‘upload’ the background image to the extension, it actually converts it into a Base64 representation of the image and stores it locally in your chrome extension storage.

This Base64 data is then inserted into the page using the background-image: url() method - which solves the problem of being unable to pull an image from an extra-twitter location (whether it be from another hosted source or from the local machine).

Links

This extension has been linked to from The Guardian, iDigitalTimes, VentureBeat, Gizmodo and Lifehacker!