Orkut has introduced over a dozen themes for their users to choose. But unlike iGoogle themes, Orkut doesn’t have the API required for third parties to build themes for the service. If you use Firefox + Greasemonkey, then you can build your own Orkut themes in just a few seconds. Here’s how:
- Go to this page, and enter the url of a valid image. (Make sure that your image has enough width, else it’ll get repeated)
- Click on the submit button and you’ll get the greasemonkey script with the background image of your choice.
It took me several trial and errors to determine the best width for Orkut. If you are already using an official theme, then make sure you switch back to the classic theme before using the custom greasemonkey theme. Else, it’ll screw it up.
Custom themes will extend the pageload time by several seconds. This is because it has to fetch the image from an external source after the page is fully loaded. Personally, I’m not a great fan of themes for Orkut. I’ll stick to the classic Orkut theme for now.
Hopefully, Google will someday open-up Orkut’s themes API to developers [Via: Nirmal TV]
Discussion
Comments for “Quickest Way to Build Custom Orkut Theme”